For working families, it’s always a game of choices: attend an 8 a.m. Zoom call or take the kids to school. Go out of town for a conference or wait at home for yet another delayed UPS package.

A new study from Kellogg’s Benjamin Friedrich offers a glimpse into the impact behind these kinds of decisions, especially on the careers of working mothers.

This week, we’ll look at the stubbornness of the gender gap and what employees could do to help. Plus, the hunt for chief AI officers.

A game of life

In 2015, women held 37 percent of corporate-manager jobs; by 2024, the number had only increased to 39 percent. Other data suggest that firms are still investing more resources into hiring and promoting men than women for leadership positions.

Kellogg’s Benjamin Friedrich and coauthors developed a model from 25 years of data on domestic partnerships and employment trajectories to study how household and company decisions drive this persistent phenomenon. Friedrich looked at the choices of men and women (what career paths to choose, whether to get married, or whether to start a family), the signals that these decisions sent to companies, and how those firms responded.

They found a feedback loop that replicated the real-world gender gap. When women with management potential make the decision to pull back on work, companies put more-available men on the management track instead—even when both are equally qualified. The companies’ decision, in turn, sends a signal back to households that they can best maximize their own collective earning potential by prioritizing a man’s career.

“Not everyone can become a manager, so [firms] need to pick and choose who to invest in,” Friedrich says. “This is an expensive investment that involves high-profile assignments and mentoring, so the firm is thinking about who will provide the highest potential return on that training.”

However, Friedrich’s research identified the potential for two policies to break the cycle: a quota system requiring firms to give an equal number of men and women management positions and a mandatory parental-leave policy.

Read more at Kellogg Insight.

Need a chief AI officer?

Since ChatGPT’s debut, businesses have raced to adopt artificial intelligence into workflows and understand AI expertise in leadership. Enter the chief AI officer, or CAIO. But does every firm need one? Former head of AI at Uber and current Kellogg professor Birju Shah says it depends.

“A majority of businesses all the way up to the Fortune 500 need to either train or change their current executives to gain AI capability, but that doesn’t necessarily mean creating a chief AI officer position,” Shah says. There are three questions to check if a CAIO’s needed, he suggests.

First, got a million customers? “If you have under a million-customer scale, it’s easier and cheaper just to have humans handle it. If you’re over a million-customer scale, things get more nuanced,” says Shah.

Second, are you offering the same products to everyone, or moving into personalization? If the answer’s the latter, AI will be fundamental. Consider Netflix’s ascent to gold standard status for understanding consumers with machine learning-based recommendations.

Third, do you have the resources and expertise in place to implement AI? Shah recommends having people already in place with math skills, bioinformatics backgrounds, and other qualities that could support the CAIO.

Surpassed these thresholds? Congratulations, and best of luck on the search. Now, figure out how to structure the role and how to optimize AI investments long term with Shah at Kellogg Insight.

Have a great week!

Blake Goble, marketing manager
Kellogg Insight