Workers care deeply about wage and employment stability. Given potentially differing attitudes towards risk, we investigate whether the provision of wage and employment insurance by firms differs for men and women. We find that women are less protected than men against idiosyncratic shocks to their employers—a gender gap in firm insurance. Using detailed administrative data from Sweden, we document that the elasticity of women’s wages with respect to variations in firm’s idiosyncratic performance is 90% higher than that of men. The likelihood of dismissal due to a negative firm shock is 36% higher for female than for male employees. These gender differences in exposure to corporate idiosyncratic shocks are larger for employees with children, in firms with fewer female executives, and in financially constrained firms.

We show that signals of leadership qualification are more important for women's career advancement than for men's. Specifically, signals of higher education, professional experience and access to professional networks increase male directors' probability to enter a leadership position by 5.2%, and their compensation by 5.7% ($246,900). Female directors with these signals are 11.0% more likely to enter a leadership position, and their compensation is 19.7% ($796,800) higher. This result is in line with models of screening discrimination, in which women need to provide more observable skill signals to counterbalance higher uncertainty about their unobservable qualifications for a leadership position. Supporting this channel, we find that our results are stronger if information asymmetries between (mostly) male employers and female candidates are larger: successions after the sudden death of a CEO, successions in firms with all-male nomination committees, and outside hires.

This paper provides novel evidence that female politicians increase the proportion of US government procurement contracts allocated to women-owned firms. The identification strategy uses close elections for the US House of Representatives. The effect concentrates in local contractors and persists after the female politician’s departure. The more gender-balanced representation in government contracting does not seem to be associated with economic costs, as the firm characteristics of the average contractor and contract performances are unchanged. By analyzing congressional requests from legislators to federal agencies, we show that female politicians affect procurement contract allocation through individual oversight.