1. Introduction
This paper reviews research on gender differences in wages and career progression among employees of the Banco de España (BdE), the Spanish central bank. The analysis draws on comprehensive personnel records from the BdE. These data are highly confidential, and we were fortunate to obtain access to anonymized personnel records for the purposes of the study presented in Bover, Hospido, and Lamo (2025, BHL).
The BdE made these data available in response to its interest in understanding potential gender differences in the earnings and career trajectories of its employees. It happened at a time when the BdE was implementing a gender equality plan that included work-life balance measures intended to make the Bank more attractive to women at all levels of the organization.
A central focus of our review is whether gender-based discrimination may have played a role in promotion decisions, particularly at higher levels of the managerial hierarchy. Two key motivations for studying these questions are gender representation in the economics profession and the role of heterogeneous firm environments, which we elaborate on next.
Women in the economics profession
Our study is related to a recent literature on gender in the economics profession. The BdE is a large employer of professional economists at both the Spanish and EU levels, making it a relevant setting in which to study the representation and experiences of women in economics.
The study of women in economics is more than an exercise in introspection. There is evidence that gender diversity is a source of intellectual diversity, which can broaden the scope and improve the quality of economic research. Women economists tend to study different topics and approach them using different methods or perspectives compared to men. They are disproportionately concentrated in fields such as labor economics, health, education, and public economics (Bayer and Rouse 2016), while their representation is substantially lower in macroeconomics, finance, and mathematical methods (Chari and Goldsmith-Pinkham 2017). Women also tend to adopt more interdisciplinary methods and are more likely to collaborate across fields (Lundberg and Stearns 2019).
These differences matter not only for the economics profession and the production of knowledge, but also for policy design. In a male-dominated field, economic research and policy advice may be more likely to reflect male experiences or priorities.
Heterogeneous firm environments
It is well established that firms are heterogeneous and that these differences matter for wage setting. Firms and sectors also play an important role in shaping gender gaps in wages and career progression. For example, job flexibility varies substantially across sectors, and in settings where flexibility is available, gender gaps are practically nonexistent (Goldin 2014).
More generally, there is growing evidence that firms and organizations differ in their selection practices, training opportunities, promotion standards, amenities for working mothers, and organizational culture (e.g., Adams et al. 2025; Sharma et al. 2025). Yet we still know relatively little about which differences across employers are responsible for particular gender gaps.
Complete personnel records make ideal case studies for exploring these questions, as they provide detailed information on career progression across different job levels within an organization. This is especially relevant when considering how careers advance in different institutional settings. In the corporate sector, career advancement may often occur through mobility across employers, whereas at a central bank such as the BdE, internal career progression is likely to play a much more central role.
Why the Banco de España?
Most of the literature on gender gaps in the economics profession focuses on academic economists. Yet central banks are also important employers of economists and, like academia, face substantial female scarcity, particularly in managerial positions. At the same time, the working environment and incentive structure faced by central bank economists differ substantially from those of academic economists. Understanding the factors that shape women’s career progression in central banks is therefore important in its own right and may provide lessons of broader applicability to other organizations.
Hospido, Laeven, and Lamo (2022), using personnel records from the European Central Bank (ECB), provide the first study of women’s career progression within a central bank. Our personnel records from the BdE offer an important additional advantage: they allow us to observe promotions to the higher managerial positions (Division Heads and Department Directors), and our most interesting results relate to these promotions. These promotions lead to the positions of leadership and organizational power within the BdE, immediately below the top management, consisting of Directors General, the Deputy Governor, and the Governor.
The institutional setting of the BdE also provides an interesting environment in which to study gender differences in career progression. Promotions operate through a mixed system that combines competitive calls with direct appointments and promotions. This distinction may matter because the mechanisms governing access to managerial positions can differ substantially across these two routes.
Moreover, there may be important differences in job flexibility—and possibly in gender gaps—between managerial and non-managerial positions. The career costs associated with having children may change substantially when an employee moves from a non-managerial to a managerial position, even within the same organization (Adda, Dustmann, and Stevens 2017).
The BdE appears to be an attractive employer, as suggested by revealed preference: employees tend to remain at the institution for a long time after joining. This relatively low-turnover environment allows us to study life-cycle gender gaps in career progression with limited concerns about selective attrition from the institution. This is relevant because women may sometimes withdraw from the labor market to reconcile work and family responsibilities, potentially reflecting workplaces that are poorly designed for women’s needs.
In this respect, the BdE provides an interesting setting with unique characteristics. The BdE offers high job security to its permanent employees, along with the legal possibility for mothers with young children to switch from full-time to part-time work. We find it interesting to study how women’s careers progress relative to men’s in a relatively protective environment like this one.
Outline
The remainder of the paper is organized as follows. Section 2 describes the representation of women at the BdE, its promotion procedures, and the data, following BHL. Section 3 summarizes the results in BHL, first examining gender gaps in wages and then gender gaps in promotions. Section 4 investigates the potential role of self-selection into competitive promotion processes and discusses possible interpretations and implications. Finally, Section 5 concludes.
2. Gender representation, promotion procedures, and data at the BdE
Share of women over time and across professional groups
The proportion of women at the BdE has increased substantially over time, rising from 30% in 1987 to slightly above 50% in 2023, out of a total workforce of around 3,500 people. This increase in the share of women has occurred across all professional groups, although significant differences remain between them. Women account for 59% of support administrators, around 50% of junior and senior experts, 43% of middle managers, and 35% of top managers. Overall, the BdE currently employs a similar number of men and women, but notable gender differences persist across professional groups, particularly at higher levels of responsibility.
Promotion procedures
The BdE uses three different mechanisms for professional progression. The first is vertical promotion (promoción vertical), which involves an advancement in the salary scale granted annually to some employees without a change in their position. This mechanism applies to both managerial and non-managerial positions. The second is direct appointment (libre designación), which is used for some appointments to managerial positions. The third mechanism is competitive calls (concurso), through which candidates are selected for managerial and non-managerial positions based on examinations and/or interviews conducted by a selection committee. Candidates must apply for the vacancy, and in some cases the competition is also open to external applicants.
Overall, professional progression at the BdE can take two main forms: moving up the hierarchical structure or, within the same hierarchical level, progressing through the salary scale by being granted a permanent salary increase without a change in duties. Advancement to a higher hierarchical level can occur either through direct appointment or through a competitive selection process. In the latter case, candidates must first apply for the position and then go through the corresponding selection procedure.
Data
BHL built a panel dataset that combines anonymized personnel files with information on recruitment and selection processes at the worker-month level. Importantly, the data allow us to observe promotions to higher managerial positions, excluding top management above department directors, branches, and other entities. This makes it possible to examine gender differences in career trajectories over time, including transitions between managerial and non-managerial positions.
The raw personnel records date back to 1959, but computerized records for the earlier years are incomplete. In addition, a change in the hierarchical structure in the late 1980s means that comparable time series can only be constructed from 1987 onwards. The dataset used in the BHL analysis therefore contains 889,065 monthly observations for 5,757 employees aged between 20 and 70 over the period 1987–2023. Annual salary information is available from 2000 onwards, contractual hours from 2009, and information on selection processes from 2013. Consequently, most of the multivariate analysis focuses on the period 2013–2023.
3. Gender gaps in wages and promotions
Gender wage gaps
The analysis in BHL begins by examining gender differences in wages. Raw comparisons show that women earn lower annual wages on average than men. However, these differences partly reflect variations in observable characteristics such as experience, professional category, and working hours. Regression analysis indicates that once these factors are taken into account, most of the gender wage gap disappears. Differences in professional category explain a substantial portion of the gap, highlighting the importance of career progression in determining wage outcomes.
Another important factor is parenthood. The data show that men and women work similar hours until their early thirties. After that age, women’s average working hours decline relative to men’s for a period of several years. This pattern coincides with typical child-rearing ages and suggests that differences in working hours contribute to the observed wage gap. Indeed, when hourly wages are considered instead of annual wages, the remaining gender differences become much smaller.
These findings indicate that wage disparities are closely linked to differences in working time and career trajectories rather than to unequal pay within the same position.
Gender differences in promotion processes
The overall monthly promotion rate is 1.26%, with no significant gender difference, either conditionally or unconditionally. In the specification allowing the gender gap to vary with parenthood, mothers have a significantly lower promotion probability, although the estimated difference is quantitatively small. Since these figures aggregate different types of promotions, we next examine gender gaps by promotion process.
We consider 3,021 promotion processes: 2,451 vertical promotions, 376 competitive calls, and 194 direct appointments. For each process, we compare the promotion chances of male and female potential candidates. For competitive calls, we also examine gender differences in the probability of applying.
Our first result concerns promotions to higher managerial positions (Division Head and Department Director). There is a negative gender gap in competitive calls (i.e., a higher share of men than women are promoted), but no significant gap for direct appointments or vertical promotions. We find the same pattern in the areas where most economists work. Interestingly, in these areas, women in lower managerial positions are more likely than men to receive vertical promotions (salary increases) without hierarchical advancement, potentially serving as a consolation for not reaching higher levels of the hierarchy.
Finally, women are less likely than men to apply to competitive calls, both for higher- and lower-level managerial positions, with the gap being larger for higher positions. However, in the areas where most economists work, there is no significant gender gap in application rates.
4. Role of self-selection and discussion of the results
Overall, we find a negative gender gap in competitive calls for promotions to higher managerial positions, together with a negative gap in applications. If women who apply are positively self-selected, which is a plausible assumption, our estimated promotion gap would be a lower bound in absolute value. In other words, accounting for self-selection would imply an even larger negative gender gap in competitive promotions. The intuition is that women who choose to apply may be those with relatively high chances of being promoted. This would generate a positive correlation between the unobserved determinants of applying and those of being promoted, leading to an attenuation bias in the estimated promotion gap.
During the period of analysis, we therefore find a negative gender gap in access to higher managerial positions at the BdE, but only through competitive calls and not through direct appointments. One possible explanation relates to gender stereotypes in leadership contexts. Research in psychology suggests that ambitious women may be perceived less favorably than equally ambitious men, who are more likely to be viewed positively when seeking leadership roles (Lyness and Heilman 2006; Manzi, Caleo, and Heilman 2024). Women who actively apply for managerial positions may instead be perceived as overly ambitious or self-promoting, particularly when they do so without being explicitly encouraged. These social penalties may contribute to lower promotion rates.
This has important implications for women’s career advancement, as qualified women may be overlooked for leadership positions. It may also affect organizational performance by limiting the diversity of perspectives represented in senior management.
5. Conclusions
The data show that the BdE has come a long way during the period of analysis. The gaps in the share of employees, comparable wages, and promotion rates have all but disappeared. It is also remarkable that we found no evidence of gender gaps in promotions to higher managerial positions through direct appointment.
However, our findings also indicate that women have been penalized for applying to leadership positions on their own initiative, even if it is possible that they were compensated with pay raises. This may represent an instance of what the psychological literature has described as unconscious biases associated with traditional gender norms and expectations.
We can therefore conclude with two positive outcomes of this study. First, the evidence of the progress made. Second, the power of data analysis to convert unconscious biases into conscious evidence, which, thanks to being detected, can be remedied.