Although female participation in the labor force has increased enormously over the past decades, females are still significantly underrepresented at the corporate leadership level. One important question is what contributes to this phenomenon. There have been many studies on the “glass ceiling” effect of gender bias against women at the top executive level. On top of that, some researchers make the observation that even when women break up the “glass ceiling” they are often put to run struggling companies and thus are more likely to be pushed off the “glass cliff”. These studies get a lot of attention because of the general perception of the existence of gender bias and various women’s right movements. However, the academic evidence on this important topic is in our view unreliable. A major weakness of existing evidence is that they are all based on small samples so they are sample specific and susceptible to outlier influences. Lauren and I decided to contribute to this discussion by looking at a much larger cross-section and time-series data of CEO turnover events in U.S. public firms.

We leverage on the fact that I have a large CEO turnover database complied by myself over many years. Lauren Dutch helped to extend the database from 2013 to 2016 by going through all news announcements of CEO turnover and coding the circumstances under which each CEO turnover event occurred. I linked the data to other databases to get information on each firm. We then worked together to analyze the data.

Our analysis show that the “glass cliff” theory is a myth. We find that women are actually more likely to be appointed to the CEO position when the firm is performing well and when the previous CEO leaves the firm voluntarily. We do not claim that there is no gender bias. As a matter of fact, our finding that women are less likely to be appointed when the previous CEO is forced out suggests that the boards of directors seem to have less trust in female executive’s ability to manage crisis situations. s. Instead, we argue that the gender bias, if any, appears to protect female CEOs from failures rather than accelerate it as the “glass cliff” papers suggest. Our examination of other aspects of CEOs also suggest that there is less gender bias against women at the corporate leadership level. In particular, we find that females in general become CEOs at a younger age than males but also leave the CEO position at a younger age. However, this is no significant difference in their tenure as CEO. We also find the female CEOs are just as likely to come from outside the firm as male CEOs. Overall, our study suggests that the gender bias at the corporate leadership level is not as severe as most people believe. It is more fruitful to look beyond gender bias to find an explanation for the underrepresentation of women among corporate leaders.

Karli Filips has been my faculty scholar for three years and has become a co-author on two accepted refereed journal manuscripts:

Karen Chapman, Alexander E. Ellinger,and Jesse Nash 2019, “Benchmarking Marketing Scholar Productivity,” Marketing Education Review, in press.

Alexander E. Ellinger, Jefrey Naidoo, Andrea D. Ellinger, Karli Filips and Gregory D. Herrin, “Applying Blue Ocean Strategy to Hire and Assimilate Disabled Workers into Distribution Centers” Business Horizons, in press.

Karli is also a co-author on two in process manuscripts:

Alexander E. Ellinger, Frank Adams, George R. Franke, Gregory D. Herrin, Tyler DeCoster, and Karli Filips. “A Longitudinal Assessment of The Extended Enterprise and Firm Performance,” targeted to International Journal of Physical Distribution and Logistics Management.

Alexander E. Ellinger, George Franke, and Karli Filips, “A Longitudinal Assessment of Sales and Operations Planning and Firm Performance,” targeted to a special issue of International Journal of Physical Distribution and Logistics Management.

With the outstanding tutelage of the Bruno Library staff, Karli has become very adept with secondary data collection and has collected some extremely complex longitudinal datasets on firm financial performance from Compustat. I am extremely proud of her scholastic achievements and have greatly enjoyed working with her. The Faculty Scholars program has been extremely beneficial to us both.

My faculty scholar, Sarah Lessley, won 2nd place for her work at URCA. We partnered with the University of Minnesota’s The Mono Project, a lab program that is developing the world’s first vaccine for the Epstein-Barr Virus which causes mononucleosis and is linked to MS, lupus, cancer and a variety of other autoimmune diseases. Our work analyzed the social media marketing audience for The Mono Project and we focused on the upcoming Gen Z interest in using social media for social good. We hope to continue our work next year to build on using social media for social good and continue to research this upcoming market segment of digital natives specific to supporting vaccine development, which is a controversial issue in the media and an important one in terms of how we communicate on global platforms like Facebook

Kayla and Caneel VanNostrad (another Faculty Scholar) assisted in setting up the Shopper Insights Lab. They also researched the impact of product packaging on consumer perceptions with a closer look at the moderating role of product knowledge. With regard to the latter, they conducted a full literature review, proposed variables, aided in the experimental design, formatted the instrument, interpreted results, and presented their findings at URCA (their work was among the award finalists). Continued work on the research they started will most definitely contribute to both theory and practice.

While Dr. Voorhees and I were very hands on, Kayla and Caneel also mentored each other. It was obvious there was a tremendous amount of planning/discussion occurring between them – the joint-scholar model, for this project, worked extremely well, and the whole-is-greater-than-the-sum-of-its-parts sentiment would apply.

The project (a two-year commitment) required the re-envisioning and development of a cohesive marketing campaign (digital and print) to raise service awareness of the Pickens County Medical Center. It was characterized by an aggressive timeline and critical dependencies.

Justin contributed extensively to this project. He participated in the literature review, in which we undertook a systematic assessment of how medical facilities foster visibility and increase utilization of their service offerings, through the evaluation of published peer-reviewed research. He gained knowledge of and experience in finding and distilling the literature to obtain a baseline understanding of 1) marketing of healthcare services to non-urban populations, 2) the utility of effective marketing strategies, and 3) the various approaches that inform best practice. He also developed prototypes of empirically supported promotional collateral and served as a presenter at all our stakeholder presentations. Over the last year we deployed the marketing plan and evaluated the effectiveness of the strategies. Justin was heavily involved in executing the tasks involved and was an indelible part of this research project.

Will Stewart’s work through the Faculty Scholars Program was exemplary. He helped us collect data on hedge fund manager’s poker tournament winnings, which we used in analyzing the link between fund manager poker skill and fund performance. In addition to simply collecting data, Will thought carefully about various complications that could arise and in initial meetings, highlighted potential problems that we had not anticipated and even suggested workable solutions around them. As a result of his efforts, we were able to generate a clean dataset in record time, and had a working paper based on the analyses in less than a year from initial data collection. In fact, I just presented the piece at UVA, MSU, and VCU last month and reception has been uniformly positive.

As an update, Dr. Sandra Mortal recently presented the piece at Nova (in Lisbon), and the piece was covered in
Bloomberg (https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-05-30/poker-playing-hedge-fund-managers-have-an-edge)
Institutional Investor (https://www.institutionalinvestor.com/article/b1fn6z273q3dkj/Did-Your-Hedge-Fund-Manager-Just-Win-a-Poker-Tournament-It-Might-Be-Time-to-Cash-In)
and several other mainstream media outlets.

Caneel and Kayla Merritt (another Faculty Scholar) assisted in setting up the Shopper Insights Lab. They also researched the impact of product packaging on consumer perceptions with a closer look at the moderating role of product knowledge. With regard to the latter, they conducted a full literature review, proposed variables, aided in the experimental design, formatted the instrument, interpreted results, and presented their findings at URCA (their work was among the award finalists). Continued work on the research they started will most definitely contribute to both theory and practice.

While Dr. Robinson and I were very hands on, Caneel and Kayla also mentored each other. It was obvious there was a tremendous amount of planning/discussion occurring between them – the joint-scholar model, for this project, worked extremely well, and the whole-is-greater-than-the-sum-of-its-parts sentiment would apply.