Events

Prof. Jordan Siegel
Professor of Strategy
Ross School of Business
University of Michigan

This study examines the extent to which rival social movements centered on gender-related issues have been associated with changes in firms’ managerial gender composition.  Using the rise of the MeToo movement (2019-2021) and the subsequent Anti-MeToo countermovement (2021-2023) in South Korea as an empirical setting, we focus on changes in women’s representation across managerial levels across firms.  We combine our statistical results from the Korea Labor Institute’s Workplace Panel Survey data with evidence from our qualitative fieldwork conducted during 2025-2026.  Results show that these social movements are associated with changes in firms’ hiring and promotion, that larger firms, in particular, increased their representation of women at all hierarchical levels of management during the peak era of the MeToo movement (2019-2021), and that during the anti-MeToo movement (2021-2023), there was a separating equilibrium among the relatively larger firms.  One subset of larger firms continued to uniformly increase their representation of women at all hierarchical levels of management despite the anti-MeToo social movement.  In contrast, another subset of larger firms continued to increase their representation of women at the very top levels of their organization, while at the same time increasing their representation of males/decreasing their representation of women from the entry managerial level to the beginning of the senior managerial levels.  The latter pattern is consistent with the possibility that some firms adopted a form of organizational compromise in response to competing societal pressures generated by the MeToo movement and the subsequent Anti-MeToo countermovement.  These two subsets of larger firms are similarly populated.  Lastly, the average change in the representation of women across the totality of all managerial levels was significantly positive for larger firms even during the Anti-MeToo period.