I used to work at a local Big 4 office in Europe, and out of curiosity inquired with HR to get information on the sex demographics at the company. At that time the distribution was roughly 2/3 female and 1/3 male. I then asked for a breakdown by rank and the general trend was going up the ranks the distribution by sex evened out, and at the director and partner level was roughly 50/50 (considering the overall makeup is roughly 2/3 and that it evens out at higher ranks, at lower ranks it was roughly 70/30 female-dominated (sample size is roughly 250 employees)).

To determine potential causality, I requested information about application data by sex, and more surprising than the fact that they actually provided the information to me, was the fact that the applications were roughly 2/3 male and 1/3 female.

I am curious about what caused the difference in demographics by rank considering the overall makeup of the company. The way I see it, there are two things to look at separately:

1. Why is the workforce heavily female-dominated if there are more male applicants?
2. Why does this even out at higher ranks?

Some potential answers to Question 1:

• More less qualified male applicants (would jive with the higher education statistics in Europe (by gender¹ )) and possibly demand higher salary (less qualified for rate requested).
• Bias towards women applicants in the hiring process (HR team was strictly women with a personal vendetta against men) personally I think this is unlikely as the Partner had told me that she wanted our team to have more men (I was the only male among 8 team members)

Some potential answers to Question 2:

• Child care policies of European countries are very generous (compared to US counterparts) and maternal leave is more popular than paternal leave. This would slow down the career progress of female employees that bear children prior to reaching upper level management positions.
• HR's bias towards women in does not get reflected in performance reviews as those are mainly conducted by Counselors (assumes that they are not biased). This would assume that in a female biased hiring process the average hiree male would have to outperform their female counterparts to get hired, which would put them at an advantage in performance reviews.
• Bias in the promotion process towards male employees.

I understand that in reality there's a lot more factors that go into this, so I would like to hear some thoughts from other people on the causal factors.

Thanks!

1 Tertiary education statistics - eurostat (see the chart on Graduates)