Pathways to the top: Career trajectories of female executives in German DAX40 companies

Abstract

This thesis investigates the career trajectories of female executives within German DAX40 companies, seeking to understand the pathways women follow to reach top leadership positions and how the characteristics of the career trajectories differ from those of their male counterparts. Despite growing female participation in the labour market, women remain underrepresented in executive roles, particularly in Germany’s largest publicly listed companies. As a result, existing research mainly centres around career trajectory examination based on male-dominated samples or investigates the barriers that limit females’ advancement. The thesis seeks to go beyond this to understand how successful female executives have reached leadership positions. Applying a qualitatively driven mixed methods approach, it combines biographical data and media sources to examine key characteristics such as education, international experience, and industry mobility. The analysis identifies recurring patterns and typologies among female executives and highlights both shared and divergent features in comparison to male colleagues. The findings reveal multiple typologies of female executive careers based on two dominant routes: Women either follow careers shaped by long-term internal advancement, or high degrees of mobility and transitions across organisational boundaries. Moreover, the pathway followed impacts the significance of external career capital such as education and international experience that the women need to acquire. A gender-based comparison further reveals that women’s pathways often diverge from male trajectories, with increased reliance on signalling internal and external credentials and building legitimacy to advance. By shifting the research focus from barriers to suc-cessful advancement, the study contributes to a context-sensitive, empirically grounded perspective on gendered careers. The results provide valuable implications for theory, policy, and practice, offering insights to better support female leadership development in Germany and beyond.