Impact assessments are an important component of a better regulation programme-an initiative of the European Commission launched to improve the quality and transparency of the EU (European Union) law-making process. In the current article, I take a closer look at the Impact Assessment (IA) issued by the European Commission together with a Directive proposing a 40% obligatory female representation on the boards of directors in European public companies. In the IA, the Commission defined an improvement of corporate governance as one of the objectives to be achieved by the Directive. The Commission claimed that the more gender-diverse a corporate board is, the better it will perform. However, it is questionable whether mandatory quotas indeed have such a positive impact on corporate governance. Here I argue that, to properly assess the impact of a given policy, it is crucial to examine how the policy measure itself interferes with corporate performance. I present both field and laboratory studies investigating the influence of mandatory quotas on company performance, individual attitudes and group cooperation. Next, I discuss implications of these findings for the evaluation of the IA quality as well as the legality of the Directive. The current analysis of the IA shows that despite recent improvements there are still considerable flaws in conducting impact assessments of the EU legal initiatives.

The quota rule in employment is a legal tool to promote gender equality in professions and positions where women are underrepresented. An accompanying assumption is that gender diversity positively affects one of the aspects of team performance in form of group cooperation. However, it is unclear whether this positive effect can be achieved if diversity increases due to a quota rule. In two fully incentivized experiments involving a real-effort task (N1 = 188 and N2 = 268), we examined the impact of quotas as compared to performance-based promotion on group cooperation. We thereby categorized participants either with regard to gender or to an artificial category that was randomly assigned. Cooperation within groups declined when promotion was based on quota compared to performance-based promotion, irrespective of the categorization criterion. Further analyses revealed that this negative effect of quota rules on cooperation is not driven by procedural fairness perceptions or expectations about performance of the promoted group member. Implications of the results for the implementation of equality and diversity initiatives are discussed.