Title:
The Gender of Labour Market Elites: Stability and Change in Characteristics of Swedish Top-Wage Earners 1995-2003

Abstract:
Previous studies have shown that the elite in the Swedish labour market consists mainly of late middle-aged men. Moreover, despite a reputation of being a relatively gender equal country, earlier studies suggest the business elite in the Swedish labour market to be more male dominated than the business elite in the United States and the United Kingdom. Assuming that the labour market elite is one important recruitment channel for e.g. board members in large corporations, compositional changes will indicate the extent to which changes over time will be observed at the very top of the corporate pyramid. Thus, the purpose is to study gender differences in the elite of large Swedish private business corporations 1995 to 2003 using national registers from the STAR database. We define the elite as the top salary employees in large firms. Our access to data covering the whole nation gives us a unique opportunity to link register data to individuals. Thus, although we work with a select group of individuals, the elite is still large enough to study. The analyses show that women’s proportion of top salary employees in large Swedish private companies has increased since the early 1990s. Even so, men are still markedly over represented in this group of employees. The tendency towards gender equalisation over time is most salient in older cohorts born in the 40s. However, the overall gender difference is less pronounced among those born in the 1960s compared to older cohorts born in the 1940s and 1950s.