Gender Diversity on U.S. Corporate Boards

Abstract

Despite rhetoric supporting the advancement of women on corporate boards, meager evidence supports significant progress over the past decade in the United States. The authors examine archival board data (for more than 3,000 U.S. publicly traded firms) from 2002 to 2011 and find that a female is most likely to be appointed to a corporate board when a woman has just exited the position. A similar propensity occurs to reappoint a male when a man leaves, although the effect is smaller than for women. The authors argue that this ''gender-matching heuristic'' can impede progress in attaining gender diversity, regardless of intention, because it emphasizes the replacement of existing women rather than changing board composition. The authors replicate this effect in follow-up laboratory studies and show that ''what works'' to increase the representation of women on boards, irrespective of gender matching, is to increase the number of women in the candidate pool.A cross the globe, corporations are under pressure to increase the number of women on their boards of directors. In the United States, although women comprise roughly 47% of the labor force and 51% of the management and professional occupations (Bureau of Labor Statistics 2013), women hold only about 17% of corporate board seats (Catalyst 2014). Many actors in government, academia, and in organizations themselves are pushing for more gender parity on corporate boards (e.g.,

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The Role of Rookie Female Directors in a Post‐Quota Period: Gender Inequalities within French Boards

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“…More generally, our finding complements the papers that looked at the effectiveness of institutional pressures to reduce gender inequality in the top executive ranks. These papers showed that diversity innovations had limited effectiveness either because corporations unknowingly used ineffective practices (Dobbin & Kalev, ) or intentionally adopted “symbolic” innovations with very limited effects (Dezső et al, ; Farrell & Hersch, ; Tinsley et al, ). In accordance with these studies, we also show that actions to demonstrate gender diversity in the top executive ranks are often symbolic because they stop after a woman gains access to these top positions; they are only effective for those promoted internally, and they are often granted to women who are of higher ability than their male counterparts.…”

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