Organizational Predictors of Women on Corporate Boards

Abstract

Women are increasing in number among corporations' boards of directors, yet their representation is far from uniform across firms. In this study, we adopted a resource dependence theory lens to identify organizational predictors of women on boards. We tested our hypotheses using panel data from the 1,000 U.S. firms that were largest in terms of sales between 1990 and 2003. We found that organizational size, industry type, firm diversification strategy, and network effects (linkages to other boards with women directors) significantly impact the likelihood of female representation on boards of directors.

Beyond human capital explanations for the gender pay gap among executives: investigating board embeddedness effects on discrimination

“…Figure 1 illustrates the interaction effects based on state of the art plotting procedures (Aiken and West 1991;Tang et al 2011). These results support the hypothesis that director embeddedness reduces gender discrimination through unequal executive compensation and can be used as further indication that embedded directors might use the multitude of board seats as a learning platform (Shropshire 2010;Hillman et al 2007;Haunschild and Beckman 1998). The experience that directors gain via their network embeddedness might affect their assessment of language barriers and proposed transaction costs in a positive way and reduce the compensation discount that is passed on to female managers.…”

“…Networks lead to the formation of elites (Davis and Greve 1997;Useem 1982). With respect to gender, these elites are predominately male (Daily et al 1999;Bilimoria andPiderit 1994, Brammer et al 2009;Adams and Ferreira 2009;Huse et al 2009;Hillman et al 2007). Among groups with similar demographical attributes, homophilous behavior can be observed (McPherson and Smith-Lovin 1987).…”

“…Thus, we control for aspects of human capital when examining the pay gap between female and male managers and ask in our research question whether the assessment of transaction costs that leads to this pay gap is influenced by network embeddedness of board members. We adopt two competing theoretical perspectives to examine embeddedness effects on discrimination: the possibility of homophily among economic elites (Shipilov et al 2011;McPherson et al 2001) and the resource function of board networks (Beckman and Haunschild 2002;Shropshire 2010;Hillman et al 2007). On the one hand, board members become members of the economic elite via additional directorships (Useem 1982;Davis and Greve 1997;Westphal and Khanna 2003) and this societal class is still predominately male (Adams and Ferreira 2009;Huse et al 2009;Hillman et al 2007).…”

Exceptional boards: Environmental experience and positive deviance from institutional norms

“…In this manner, networks create a shared social environment (Weick & Roberts, 1993) where organizations convey the value of certain practices to others in the network (Hillman, Shropshire, & Cannella, 2007) regardless of whether or not the practices enhance or diminish social or environmental welfare (Kang, 2008;Pfarrer, Smith, Bartol, Khanin, & Zhang, 2008).…”

The Role of Women Directors on Corporate Boards and Firm Financial Performance in Malaysia

“…For instance, a group of researchers found that gender plays an imperative role in determining level of firm performance [17][18][19]. In contrast, past studies such as reported by a researcher showed insignificant role of gender in predicting firm performance [20][21][22]. In the perspective of the effects of independent directors, these independent directors were deemed to be able to provide greater integrity and offer impartial judgment in the agency theory, while the resource dependency theory considers the role of external resources in affecting firm behaviors [23,24].…”