Corporate Gender Culture

Abstract

We show workplace culture is gendered. We apply computational linguistic models to listed firms’ reports to an Australian gender-equality agency to construct the first systematic measures of ‘corporate gender culture’—firms’ practices pertaining to the treatment of women across seven dimensions, from recruitment and promotion to maternity leave and sexual harassment. Our measures reveal that firms treat women systematically differently from men, but also that gender differentiation varies across industry and firm characteristics. The cultural dimension that best predicts women’s representation in corporate leadership is also the one that best predicts firm performance, namely equality of training opportunities.

Keywords: corporate gender culture, firm performance, gender diversity, computational linguistics, gender differentiation

JEL Classification: G39, L25, M50