They call it the “punishment gap.” Researchers have found that women in the U.S. financial industry suffer more severe repercussions for misconduct than their male counterparts.

Women are 20 percent more likely to lose their jobs, and 30 percent less likely to find new employment, following an incident of similar misconduct compared to men, according to a recent study. The gap is even more prominent in firms with few female managers, the study found.

The blog post When Harry Fired Sally: The Gender Punishment Gap, was published by the Bank of England Wednesday. It was written by researchers Mark Egan, an assistant professor at Harvard Business School; Gregor Matvos, professor of finance at the University of Texas at Austin; and Amit Seru, professor of finance at Stanford Graduate School of Business.

The authors presented their findings earlier this year when the BOE hosted a joint conference with the European Central Bank and the U.S. Federal Reserve Board on Gender and Career Progression.

Harvard's Egan told Corporate Counsel Thursday that the authors have received “a fair amount of relatively positive reaction” to their study. He has talked with a couple of companies that contacted him for more information, but so far no banks have invited him to chat.

The researchers studied the career trajectories of more than 1.2 million men and women working in the U.S. financial advisory industry from 2005 to 2015 and examined how their careers evolved following misconduct.

“The gender punishment gap is important,” the blog post said. Most existing research on gender discrimination focuses on wages and hiring decisions, it said. But, in a finding significant for general counsel and employment law firms, the blog said “Sixty percent of discriminatory lawsuits involve discriminatory firings. Our findings have the potential to speak to these patterns.”

It added, “More broadly, if women are held to a different standard than men, as we establish, it could limit the career progression of women in a well paying, human capital-intensive industry.”

Egan said he believes “the punishment gap could be as important, or more important, than the other forms of discrimination we typically think about.”

According to the blog, adviser misconduct “is relatively common in this industry, with roughly one in 13 advisers having a past record of misconduct.” Misconduct offenses include customer disputes resulting in a settlement or award, internal firm discipline, and regulatory and criminal offenses.

Egan said the researchers have created a website at www.eganmatvosseru.com (their three last names) where their data is publicly available for anyone interested.

Other findings highlighted in the blog included:

• Discipline follows many women throughout their career, more than it follows men. Overall, some 76 percent of male advisers maintained employment in the industry following discipline for misconduct, compared to only 63 percent of female advisers.
• Women receive more severe and long-lasting punishment despite the fact that men are twice as likely to be repeat offenders and engage in misconduct that is 20 percent more costly.
• The amount of money the employee brings in doesn't seem to matter. “We find that the gender punishment gap persists even when we control for the amount of money an adviser manages and compare male and female advisers working in the same firm, in the same branch, and at the same time,” the authors wrote.

So why the disparate treatment? The researchers suggested a connection between diversity at the executive level and discipline.

The blog stated, “At firms with no female representation at the executive/ownership level, female advisers are 42 percent more likely to experience a job separation following misconduct than their male colleagues. On the other hand, firms with equal representation of male and female executives/owners discipline male and female advisers at similar rates.”

They called the phenomenon “in-group favoritism.”

“We find evidence that the gender punishment gap is driven by in-group favoritism,” the blog stated. “The effects of the gender punishment gap are costly, long-lasting and may ultimately contribute to the glass ceiling faced by women in finance.”