A small group of employees at an organization at which the majority of staff are women have expressed concern to management that male employees are less likely to receive promotions. Management has hired an outside consultant to evaluate its promotion practices. The company provides the consultant with the following promotion and employment data from the last five years:

• 72 women have been promoted in the last five years.

• 50 men have been promoted in the last five years.

• The company has employed a total of 300 women in the last five years.

• The company has employed a total of 125 men in the last five years.

a. Using this information, calculate the company’s promotion rate for men.

Calculate the promotion rate for women. Are these rates consistent with the employees’ claim of gender inequity in promotion practices?

b. The consultant decides that she is dissatisfied with the promotion rates from Part a because most promotions in this industry require at least one year of employment. However, many of the men and women employed at the company during the five-year period under examination left the company before they’d been there for a year. She finds that over five years, 150 women and 94 men stayed at the company longer than one year. Use these new numbers to calculate revised rates of promotion for men and women in the company, assuming that all employees who received promotions were at the company for more than one year. Why are these rates different from those found for Part a? What can the consultant conclude about gender inequity in promotion practices at the company from these modified rates?

c. Using the information provided in Parts a and

b, calculate the ratio of women to men who leave the company in their first year of employment.

State what this ratio means in words.

d. Over the last five years, what percentage of women have left the company within the first year? What percentage of men?

e. Given what the consultant has learned about rates of promotion, the ratio of women to men who leave the company early, and percentages of women and men who do so, how do you think the consultant should advise the company to improve gender equity?