Title: TBA
Abstract: Multinational firms operate across diverse cultural environments, raising the question of whether cultural norms can be transmitted across their establishments through workplace interactions. This paper examines the influence of managers from countries with different gender norms on workplace culture and gender disparities in foreign establishments. Using data from a multinational operating in over 100 countries, we exploit cross-country manager rotations that are orthogonal to workers to estimate the impact of male managers’ gender attitudes on the work outcomes of male and female workers within the same team. We find that managers from countries with 1 s.d. more progressive gender attitudes narrow the gender pay gap by 5 percentage points (18%), primarily by promoting women at higher rates. The effects last beyond the manager’s rotation and are concentrated in countries with more conservative gender attitudes. Moreover, workers in the destination office change their own attitudes, as evidenced by those workers in turn being more gender-equal with their subordinates. Our evidence points to individual managers as critical in shaping corporate culture.