A new report by University of Michigan assistant professor Seth Carnahan and Temple University assistant professor Brad N. Greenwood finds that women with conservative bosses are not as likely to get promoted as women with progressive bosses.
According to the The Washington Post, Carnahan and Greenwood built on this previous research by analyzing promotion rates at the nation’s top 200 law firms between 2007 and 2012. They looked through tons of documents to do this analysis. They also determined that if a male in the group of partners donated more money to Republicans than Democrats in the past 10 to 12 years, they were considered conservative, and if you flipped it the other way they were considered liberal.
According to the Post, women are already half as likely as men to be promoted to partner. And in general, women are less likely to be promoted than their male colleagues, according to other research. But when the woman’s career is overseen by a conservative male boss, the gender gap promotion widens massively by 80 percent.
But it gets worse. The Post adds: “The study finds that women are more likely to leave the law firm if their bosses are Republican donors. Furthermore, conservative male bosses are less likely to serve on diversity committees, and less likely to pick women for their client teams, compared to liberal male bosses.”
It’s looks pretty bleak, but we can’t pretend this is shocking. From the rhetoric we’ve seen spouted by Republican politicians about women, especially this election cycle, the conservative movement in America still has a long way to go with regards to women’s rights. Conservative views of gender are having real world consequences for women’s careers, as well as other marginalized groups. If we get into the nitty gritty of this, how do conservative bosses treat women of color? Or LGBTQ+ people?
There hasn’t been a high-profile study of that yet, but the results probably wouldn’t be good.