Gender disparity in the C-suite: Do male and female CEOs differ in how they reached the top?

Through a comparison of the life and career trajectories of thirty male and thirty female CEOs of large organizations, this study offers insights into the genesis of gender disparity in corporate leadership positions, discusses the implications for leadership development, and puts forward a model explaining the disparity in CEO roles. We found gendered patterns in the accumulation of career relevant experiences stretching back to birth into working lives that created significant and cumulative limitations upon the ability of women to access CEO roles and the types of CEO appointments available to them. Limited access to career relevant experiences in childhood, adolescence and in organizations lead to on-going limitations in capital accumulation throughout women's careers. Implications of our findings for both theory and practice are discussed.     

Heterogeneity in treatment effects across diverse populations

Differences in patient characteristics, including age, sex, and race influence the safety and effectiveness of drugs, biologic products, and medical devices. Here we provide a summary of the topics discussed during the opening panel at the 2018 Johns Hopkins Center for Excellence in Regulatory Science and Innovation symposium on Assessing and Communicating Heterogeneity of Treatment Effects for Patient Subpopulations: Challenges and Opportunities. The goal of this session was to provide a brief overview of FDA-regulated therapeutics, including drugs, biologics and medical devices, and some of the major sources of heterogeneity of treatment effects (HTE) related to patient demographics, such as age, sex and race. The panel discussed the US Food and Drug Administration's role in reviewing and regulating drugs, devices, and biologic products and the challenges associated with ensuring that diverse patient populations benefit from these therapeutics. Ultimately, ensuring diverse demographic inclusion in clinical trials, and designing basic and clinical research studies to account for the intended patient population's age, sex, race, and genetic factors among other characteristics, will lead to better, safer therapies for diverse patient populations.     

Methods to assess measurement error in questionnaires of sedentary behavior

Sedentary behavior has already been associated with mortality, cardiovascular disease, and cancer. Questionnaires are an affordable tool for measuring sedentary behavior in large epidemiological studies. Here, we introduce and evaluate two statistical methods for quantifying measurement error in questionnaires. Accurate estimates are needed for assessing questionnaire quality. The two methods would be applied to validation studies that measure a sedentary behavior by both questionnaire and accelerometer on multiple days. The first method fits a reduced model by assuming the accelerometer is without error, while the second method fits a more complete model that allows both measures to have error. Because accelerometers tend to be highly accurate, we show that ignoring the accelerometer's measurement error, can result in more accurate estimates of measurement error in some scenarios. In this article, we derive asymptotic approximations for the mean-squared error of the estimated parameters from both methods, evaluate their dependence on study design and behavior characteristics, and offer an R package so investigators can make an informed choice between the two methods. We demonstrate the difference between the two methods in a recent validation study comparing previous day recalls to an accelerometer-based ActivPal.     

Expediting youth's entry into employment whilst overlooking precariousness: Flexi‐employability and disciplinary activation in Hong Kong

With an emphasis placed on supply‐side interventions such as skills training and incentives enhancement, active labor market polices (ALMPs) are strongly promoted by international organizations and widely adopted across different welfare regimes to boost employment rates. This article first presents the under‐examined relationship between ALMPs and employment precariousness, which has posed a challenge to the neoliberal notion of employability and activation. Youth‐focused employment policies tend to speed up employment entry whilst downplaying the risk of precariousness and the importance of job quality, and thus further reinforcing the belief that engaging in precarious employment is tolerable if not inevitable. The article then examines the case of Hong Kong, which illustrates that its relatively low rate of youth unemployment may conceal the unfavorable employment conditions confronted by youth. It is argued that the service‐led employment policies and short‐term vocational training define the employability of young workers in terms of labor flexibilities. The coined phase of “flexi‐employability” is characterized by promoting youth's readiness for, and adaptability to, the volatilities and changing demands of the labor market. Arguably, the disciplinary approach to youth activation would only strengthen the work‐first principle by enforcing young people to take up jobs available and leave welfare as soon as possible, but without thoroughly addressing the risks and insecurities generated by the labor market in undermining their well‐being.     

Measuring servitization progress and outcome: the case of ‘advanced services’

The purpose of this paper is to establish a framework for assessing the progress and outcome of a manufacturer’s transformation towards becoming a provider of ‘advanced services’ – a complex bundling of products and services, whereby manufacturers offer capabilities and outcomes instead of products alone. ‘Advanced services’ represent the most complex offering in the current servitization trend amongst manufacturers. However, current performance measures lack the breadth and focus to assess progress or outcomes, and so support research and practice of organisational transformation efforts required. To address this gap the paper investigates how a manufacturer’s efforts to become an ‘advanced services’ provider can be comprehensively measured, and develops a framework for assessing the transformation journey towards becoming an ‘advanced services’ provider. The research method is based on (1) a systematic literature review process to create a comprehensive set of service-related performance measures that are available to assess a manufacturer’s servitization efforts, followed by (2) an engagement with an expert panel to synthesise the identified measures and create a set of ‘advanced services’ performance measures. The proposed framework is presented as a scorecard that can be used in practice to assess the progress and outcome of a manufacturer’s transformation towards becoming a provider of ‘advanced services’.     

Father's Migration and Leaving the Parental Home in Rural Mozambique

Migration is an increasingly common global phenomenon and has important implications for the well‐being of family members left behind. Although extensive research has examined the impact of parental labor migration on school‐age children, less is known about its effect on adolescents. In this study, the authors used longitudinal survey data collected in rural Mozambique (N = 515) to assess the association between father's migration and adolescent children's leaving the parental home, an important component of the transition to adulthood. The results showed that father's migration delays home‐leaving for adolescent girls and that these effects are not mediated by school enrollment. The results for boys were inconclusive. The authors also found that remittances and longer durations of paternal migration were negatively associated with the transition out of the home. On the basis of the findings, they argue that father's migration delays girls' marriage.