The state, courts, and equal opportunities for female CEOs in U.S. organizations: Specifying institutional mechanisms

While institutional analyses have convincingly demonstrated the association between institutional environments and the rise of due-process structures in the workplace, they have been less clear on the extent to which institutional environments and due-process structures actually matter for worker outcomes in organizations. Through an analysis of CEOs in a national sample of U.S. organizations, this article contributes to institutional research in two ways: First, we examine the actual implications of institutional environments and due-process structures for equality of opportunity for women in the workplace, focusing on the likelihood that an organization will have a female CEO. Second, whereas institutional analyses have often relied on the presence of time-period effects to draw inferences about unmeasured characteristics of institutional environments, we measure characteristics of the institutional environment directly at the state and federal levels. Results show that specific aspects of the institutional environment in which an organization is situated, as well as the structure of an organization's internal labor market, are significant predictors of whether an organization will have a female CEO.