Center for Social Innovation

This paper explores an additional reason for the exodus and the persistence of gender inequality in organizations. The focus on high-ranking executive women allows one to separate the effects of formal power and gender. These women occupy positions of considerable formal power, yet they are disempowered, in some ways, by their gender. The paper examines micro-processes that undermine the formal power of high ranking women in a male-dominated organization, showing how the capacity of these women to reduce systemic causes of gender inequality is therefore more limited than it might appear.