In the US, women are less likely than men to relocate, which may impact their career trajectories
Data Scientist at LinkedIn
As the labor force participation rate for women has been increasing in the last 5 years in the US, so has the conversation and research around how dependent care responsibilities can have adverse career outcomes for women, who traditionally have taken on a larger share of these types of roles in the household. We know from colleagues’ research that men in the US continue to see higher promotion rates and more leadership positions held than women. But what explains that important gender gap in the workforce?
In a white paper, Matthew Baird, Allison Lewis, and I analyze LinkedIn survey and profile data and find that men are more likely than women to relocate to places with few connections, a sign of moving for career opportunities. This difference potentially explains the gender promotion gap.
Men are more likely to be promoted than women
Upon examining millions of LinkedIn member profile histories in the US, we found men in entry-level positions are 2.4% more likely than women to be working in a non-entry level role one year later. In other words, for every 1,000 entry-level men, 103 will be promoted each year and for every 1,000 women, 100 women will be promoted. While this may seem small, when scaled to the overall labor population in the US, it translates to tens of thousands more men will be promoted out of entry level positions than women every year. A similar gap is found between the genders during promotions into management positions. These differences in probability lead to the large disparities between men and women in their likelihood of holding senior positions, as we have reported in a prior report.
Women end up living closer to where they grew up, and are less likely to make moves to locations where they have few connections
New career opportunities, including those which include promotion to more senior roles, sometimes require workers to relocate. But what if men and women do not have the same flexibility in relocating? Inability to relocate for various reasons could be a barrier in people’s career trajectory.
In a recent LinkedIn Workforce Confidence Index Survey, we asked members if they live within an hour of where they grew up. If women are disproportionately called on to help provide informal care to family members as the literature has shown, we should see women more likely to live close to where they grew up. And that is exactly what we found: women are 8% more likely than men to report that they live less than one hour from where they grew up. Additionally, when examining LinkedIn member profiles over time, we found that men are 13% more likely than women to relocate each year and are more likely to move somewhere they do not already have many LinkedIn connections, potentially an indication of moving for career purposes rather than for social ones.
Women are less likely than men to have made moves for their own career in the past, but more likely to have made moves for their partner’s careers
As our data suggests, women may be more likely than men to stay close to their hometowns and not move to new locations. To further investigate whether these moves (or lack thereof) could have an impact on career trajectories, we asked respondents questions in the survey about whether they have made a move in the past for their own careers, as well as if they have for their partner’s careers. We found that women are 28% less likely than men to have made a move for their own careers (30.6% of women compared to 39.3% of men). Interestingly, women are also more likely than men to have made moves for their partner’s careers (18.7% vs. 15.2%).
What about workers who have moved for their partner’s careers but never for their own career? It isn’t hard to imagine that both together would have the most negative impact on promotion. Women are more than twice as likely to fall in this group of individuals who have moved for their partner’s career but not for their own careers (7.7% of all surveyed women, 2.9% for men).
Gender differences in relocating to places with few connections is an important contributor to the overall promotion disparity
We dug further into changes in LinkedIn member’s profiles over time to understand how relocation differences impact women’s decreased likelihood of being promoted. In order to do this, we first define relocation destinations as either social or non-social locations. Social locations are places where a particular LinkedIn member already has many LinkedIn connections with family, friends, former classmates, former coworkers, and more. Non-social locations are places where there are few to no connections. Moves to non-social locations are typically for career opportunities while moves to social ones can be due to multitudes of reasons such as family, friends, etc. When analyzing how men and women relocate to these places, we found that while moves to non-social locations are only associated with 5% of promotions, they account for 40% of the gender gap in promotions. In other words, if women were moving to non-social locations as often as men, we would see the gender gap in promotions narrow significantly.
While relocation to non-social locations are an important factor of the gender gap, they still are relatively rare. Over 95% of people do not move from one year to the next in our data. The implication of this is that, to accomplish the greatest reduction in the gender gap, society should find ways to eliminate the difference between men and women in their promotion rates when not moving. Our calculations suggest that doing so would narrow around two-thirds of the overall promotion gap. Both goals–increasing women’s ability to move to non-social locations for career opportunities, and eliminating the promotion gap when they can’t–are important societal goals for gender equity in the workforce.
Where do we go from here?
Women may be missing out on career progression because they are not moving for job opportunities that can improve their careers. Firms and workers should look for ways to support women’s careers in the same ways as men. These might include…
Supporting women in their decision to move for career opportunities. Given relocation differences explain nearly half of the gender gap in promotions, examining reasons why women are not moving away from home at the same rate as men allows us to increase support for women in relocating when it helps their careers. If reasons are mostly monetary, companies should be encouraged to provide relocation packages to help women with their moves. However, perhaps women face more societal pressure than men to live closer to home and this needs to be mitigated.
Connect more career opportunities to women who cannot move or choose not to move for various reasons through remote jobs. Employers offering remote work opportunities may provide a way to mitigate some of this disparity even if women are not able to relocate.
Firms should work to identify lingering barriers to internal promotion that may disproportionately impact women. Aligning men and women’s promotion rates when not relocating provides the single best opportunity for eliminating the overall gender gap.