From exception to exceptional: How gender and tenure impact sponsor effectiveness

Sponsorship involves high-status and influential colleagues (sponsors) advocating on behalf of junior colleagues (sponsees) to secure opportunities. Sponsorship has been shown to be important for career advancement, particularly for women, who contend with gender biases in evaluation processes. However, less is known about how these same biases impact sponsors’ ability to successfully secure opportunities for sponsees. We examined personal referrals provided in hiring using a multi-methods approach to answer this question: evidence across two studies showed differences in male versus female sponsors’ effectiveness, such that greater tenure increases female sponsors’ effectiveness but not male sponsors. Study 1 provided initial evidence of this effect using archival data on the U.S. Supreme Court clerkship hiring process. Study 2 replicated and extended these findings in an experiment, showing greater tenure conferred credibility to female sponsors and this, in turn, increased their effectiveness, but greater tenure does not increase male sponsors’ efficacy.