Female Leadership and Gender Gap within Firms: Evidence from an Italian Board Reform

Agata Maida and Andrea Weber

No 12099, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: Over the last decade, several countries have followed the Norwegian example and introduced laws mandating gender quota for corporate board membership. The main aim of these laws is breaking the "glass ceiling" which prevents women from advancing into top corporate positions. In this paper, we evaluate the Italian law of 2011, which installed a step-wise increase in gender quota that remain effective for three consecutive board renewals of listed limited liability firms. We link firm-level information on board membership and board election dates with detailed employment and earnings records from the Social Security registers. Exploiting the staggered introduction of the gender quota regulation and variation in board renewals across firms, we evaluate the effect of the board gender composition on measures of gender diversity in top positions over a period of 4 years. While the reform substantially raised the female membership on corporate boards, we find no evidence of spillover effects on the representation of women in top executive or top earnings positions. Our results confirm the findings by Bertrand et al. (2019) who study the introduction of a gender quota for board members in Norway. Given that Italy is a much less egalitarian society than Norway, with a larger scope of establishing gender equality, our results confirm that board quota policies alone are ineffective in raising female representation in top corporate positions, at least in the short run.

Keywords: glass ceiling; corporate board reform; gender quota; female employment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J24 J7 J78 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 40 pages
Date: 2019-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eur, nep-gen and nep-lma
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (32)

Published - published in: ILR Review, 2022, 75 (2), 488-515

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp12099.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Female Leadership and Gender Gap within Firms: Evidence from an Italian Board Reform (2022)
Working Paper: Female Leadership and Gender Gap within Firms: Evidence from an Italian Board Reform (2019)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:iza:izadps:dp12099

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().