Sisterhood in COVID-19’s she-cession: does stronger female representation mean weaker female discrimination?

Abstract

Purpose

Gender equality is an important issue targeted all around the world, see, for example, the Gender Equality Strategy articulated by the European Union (EU). These goals were hindered by COVID-19, which caused a well-documented she-cession: females were hit harder than males. This paper shows that a “sisterhood behaviour” can mitigate the effects of the she-cession: female decision-makers were more likely to favour other females in recruitment and retention.

Design/methodology/approach

Motivated by theories from psychology and industrial demography, we hypothesise a so-called sisterhood effect or homophily: female decision-makers are more likely to favour other females in recruitment and retention. We use firm-level survey data from 19 European countries collected before and during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, and we apply a difference-in-differences methodology to test the hypothesised sisterhood behaviour.

Findings

Our study finds that in firms where the top manager was a woman, gender discrimination was less likely or even not at all presented, i.e. COVID-19 did not decrease the proportion of female employees.

Practical implications

The results suggest that promoting gender equality in leadership dimensions can also moderate discrimination at the level of the employees. Therefore, in a wider context, gender equality goals are interrelated.

Originality/value

To the best of the author’s knowledge, this paper is the first attempt to analyse the existence of the theories mentioned before in a manager – employee relationship using firm-level data from the COVID-19 period.