“Glass Walls” in Academic Accounting? The Role of Gender in Initial Employment Position

This research examines whether gender interacts with quality of doctoral training to influence the likelihood of new accounting faculty candidates obtaining initial employment at institutions with accounting doctoral programs during the period from 1991 to 1997. Using data from Hasselback's Accounting Faculty Directory, we find that female candidates trained at top‐tier and bottom‐tier doctoral programs are equally likely as male candidates to attain appointments at doctoral schools, while female candidates trained at middle‐tier doctoral programs are less likely than their male counterparts to obtain such positions. These results are robust to the use of different external doctoral program rankings to partition our data and, based on several sensitivity tests, our results do not appear to be the result of self‐selection.