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Better in the Shadows? Public Attention, Media Coverage, and Market Reactions to Female CEO Announcements

Edward Bishop Smith, Jillian Chown, and Kevin Gaughan

Sociological Science May 17, 2021
10.15195/v8.a7


Combining media coverage data from approximately 17,000 unique media outlets with the full population of CEO appointments for U.S. publicly traded firms between 2000 and 2016, we investigate whether female CEO appointments garner more public attention compared with male appointments, and if so, whether this increased attention can help make sense of the previously reported negative market reaction to these events. Contrary to prior reports, our data do not indicate that the appointments of female CEOs elicit overly negative market reactions, on average. Our results do highlight an important moderating role of public attention, however. We demonstrate that greater attention—even when exogenously determined—contributes to negative market reactions for female CEO appointments but positive market reactions for male CEOs, all else held constant. Additionally, female CEO appointments that attract little attention garner significant positive responses in the market, compared with both male CEOs drawing similarly limited levels of attention and female CEOs drawing high levels of attention. Our results help to reconcile contrasting empirical findings on the effects of gender in executive leadership and parallel recent work on anticipatory bias and second-order discrimination in alternative empirical contexts. Implications for research on attention, gender bias, and executive succession are discussed.
Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Edward Bishop Smith: Management and Organizations Department, Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University
E-mail: ned-smith@kellogg.northwestern.edu

Jillian Chown: Management and Organizations Department, Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University
E-mail: jillian.chown@kellogg.northwestern.edu

Kevin Gaughan: Management and Organizations Department, Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University (formerly)
E-mail: kevin.gaughan@northwestern.edu

Acknowledgments: We have benefitted from the advice of Jeanne Brett, Roberto Fernandez, Brayden King, Maxim Sytch, Ed Zajac, FilippoWezel, Ezra Zuckerman, and seminar participants at MIT, Harvard,Washington University, and Dartmouth. Correspondence may be directed to Ned Smith, Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University 2211 Campus Drive, Evanston, IL 60208, ned-smith@kellogg.northwestern.edu.

  • Citation: Smith, Edward Bishop, Jillian Chown, and Kevin Gaughan. 2021. “Better in the Shadows? Public Attention, Media Coverage, and Market Reactions to Female CEO Announcements.” Sociological Science 8: 119-149.
  • Received: February 10, 2021
  • Accepted: March 7, 2021
  • Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Sarah Soule
  • DOI: 10.15195/v8.a7


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