Forced Ranking Systems and Gender Gaps in Job Tenure

Using career history data from employees’ online profiles, we provide empirical evidence regarding how human resources systems can affect the gender gap in job tenure. Our results indicate that female workers experience shorter average job tenure than male workers. Our results further show that abandoning forced ranking systems helps to narrow this gender gap. We present experimental evidence indicating that in forced ranking environments, women experience shorter tenure than men and are more likely to exit their roles. This is true even when women are on equal footing with men. Finally, we present survey evidence that under forced ranking systems, more women resign as compared with men. In sum, our empirical, experimental, and survey results indicate that forced ranking systems may contribute to a gender gap in job tenure. Accordingly, abandoning such systems may help promote workplace gender equality. This paper was accepted by Yan Chen, behavioral economics and decision analysis. Funding: This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China Grants 72472068, 72422022, 72272055, 72321001, 72342009, 72325010, and 72172085, the Key Project of Philosophy and Social Science Research of the Chinese Ministry of Education Grant 22JZD012, Shenzhen Natural Science Foundation Grant JCYJ20250604144252069, and Macau University of Science and Technology (MUST) Faculty Research Grant Project No. FRG-25-013-MSB. Supplemental Material: The online appendix and data files are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2022.03264 .