Welcome on board? Appointment dynamics of women as directors

Eline Schoonjans, Hanna Hottenrott and Achim Buchwald

No 23-005, ZEW Discussion Papers from ZEW - Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research

Abstract: Increasing the participation of women in top-level corporate boards is high on the agenda of policymakers. Yet, we know little about director appointment dynamics and the drivers and impediments of women appointments. This study builds on organizational and group-level behavior theories and empirically investigates how ex-ante board structures and gender-specific board dynamics impact the representation of women on corporate boards. We study boards of listed firms in Europe between 2002 and 2019 and find a declining appointment probability for every additional woman, i.e. the share of women already on the board negatively predicts the likelihood of additional women appointments. Further, we find evidence of a replacement effect, i.e. the likelihood of a woman being appointed as director is significantly larger when a woman, compared to when a man, leaves the board. We do not find spillover effects from non-executive to executive boards. These results are robust to econometric model specifications that address potential endogeneity concerns using matching and instrumental variables. Our results confirm that board director appointments are gender specific and suggest that demand-side factors such as explicit and implicit norms drive women appointments up to a certain threshold.

Keywords: Executive Directors; Non-Executive Directors; Appointments; Board Dynamics; Gender; Tokenism; Critical Mass; Corporate Governance (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: G34 J08 J16 J71 L22 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-bec, nep-cfn, nep-des, nep-eur, nep-gen, nep-hrm and nep-mac
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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Journal Article: Welcome on Board? Appointment Dynamics of Women as Directors (2024)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:zewdip:23005

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