Want more women to want leadership roles at your company? Pay executives to help female employees succeed.

The psychology works like this: When women hear that their organization is committing money to achieving goals on female representation in management—even when that money flows to executives, not to them—they feel more confident that the company will support them if they decide to take on bigger roles, research by Harvard Business School Assistant Professor Edward H. Chang shows. In a field experiment at a global engineering company, almost 12% more women said they aspire to leadership positions when they learned that their employer provides incentive pay to executives for meeting female representation goals, compared to when an employer merely says the goal exists. READ MORE