Gender Bias in Job Assignment: Evidence from Retail Frontline Managers

Susan Feng Lu is a Professor of Operations Management and Statistics and holds the Alan Hudson Chair in Health Policy at the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto. She earned her Ph.D. from the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University and has established herself as a leading researcher at the intersection of health operations and technology innovation.
Professor Lu’s research explores the operational drivers of healthcare delivery, focusing on how public policies and technological innovations influence the efficiency, quality, and equity of healthcare systems. With expertise spanning health technology, nursing home operations and cardiac care delivery, she employs empirical methods and machine learning to address pressing challenges in healthcare operations. Her research has been published in prestigious journals, including Management Science, MSOM, POMS, Review of Economics and Statistics, Journal of Health Economics and Information Systems Research, as well as influential interdisciplinary outlets such as Science and Nature Scientific Reports.
Professor Lu’s work has earned numerous awards, significant research grants, and wide-reaching media attention, with features in outlets like Barron’s, Nature, Freakonomics, and Vox. Beyond her research, Professor Lu contributes to the academic community as an Associate Editor for Management Science, MSOM, and POMS. She was the President of the Chinese Economists Society during 2024-2025. Besides, she has also provided expert testimony before the United States Senate (2023) and served as a mentor for the Creative Destruction Lab. 

While anecdotes suggest that workplace gender disparities may originate early in the management career hierarchy, the existing literature on this topic has not provided sufficient evidence due to lack of real-world personnel data concerning low-level managers. This study addresses this gap by examining the effect of gender on the job assignment of frontline managers in a large sportswear retail chain. Leveraging personnel, sales, and operational data, we preestimate unobservable manager characteristics through a fixed-effect panel estimation, and then employ a leave-out average instrumental variable estimation framework to uncover causal evidence of gender bias in store-manager assignment. We find that male managers were more likely than their female counterparts to be assigned to stores with higher sales potential, i.e., core stores, stores with a larger floor size, or stores with a larger number of sales clerks. Further, we systematically rule out three alternative hypotheses related to managerial ability, preference, and career selection. To translate our findings into actionable insights, we construct a Gender Inequity Index (GII) that enables organizations to quantify potential gender bias in job assignments. Using a simulation calibrated with the retailer’s manager compensation data, we show that biased job assignments can account for a substantial share of the gender pay gap of frontline managers.