A common argument behind the gender pay gap is that too few women operate on compensation committees, which results in women persistently being underpaid even if they do break the glass ceiling and make it to the top of our organizations.

It’s an argument that receives support from research from Cambridge Judge Business School, which highlights how the presence of women on compensation committees tends to eliminate the biases that so often work against female candidates.

These biases often work to shape the perceptions we have of leaders as individuals and of the decisions they make.  These even involve such base things such as the perceived masculinity of the individual’s voice, with those with deeper voices perceived as having more leadership capability.

“However, vocal masculinity has not been found to predict actual leadership quality in the present day, suggesting the existence of an evolutionary mismatch, whereby physical strength signals continue to bias perceptions in modern contexts although modern conditions differ substantively from ancestral conditions,” the researchers say. “This misunderstanding is a manifestation of the widely-held view, common even among scholars, that if something is evolutionary in nature, then it is impervious to change. This line of reasoning is known as the deterministic fallacy.”

Challenging bias

The researchers looked at FTSE 100 companies from 2004 to 2013, with a particular focus on the first three years of each CEO’s tenure.  The authors did this because the relative lack of performance data on the early period of a CEO’s tenure can heighten possible biases in the ways in which bosses are assessed.

By analyzing all aspects of the CEO’s compensation, including salary, bonuses, and any stock options they received, the researchers hope to provide a holistic assessment of the possible shortcomings of compensation committees.

The vocal masculinity of the CEO’s voice was measured using an approach known as “formant dispersion”, which explores the frequency band spacing of the speaker alongside perceptions of the deepness of the voice.  This approach aims to overcome any tendency to manipulate vocal masculinity, which can be a factor in competitive situations.  Instead, it is determined by the length of our vocal tracts, which are fairly fixed once we reach adulthood.

The results of the study reveal that greater female representation on compensation committees helps to limit any vocal masculinity biases that exist, which in turn affects the outcomes of the board.  The researchers hope that their work will have broad implications and influence behavior in such committees.

“Our findings, which indicate that CEO vocal masculinity is less beneficial for CEOs who head firms in less competitive industries, and for CEOs being evaluated by female evaluators, suggest the possibility that these patterns could potentially extend to evaluations of the CEO by other salient stakeholders including financial analysts and journalists,” they conclude.