Gender Diversity in Boards of Directors: A Bibliometric Mapping

Abstract

The literature on gender diversity in boards of directors has expanded significantly in recent years, due to the fact that women are increasingly holding higher management positions within the company hierarchy, clearly demonstrating that certain characteristics of women have a positive impact on different areas within the company. The objective of this paper is to analyze scientific articles on the presence of women in boards of directors, based on a literature review, in order to learn about the evolution of this concept over time. The search conducted for this paper produced 300 documents from the Web of Science, with a final total result of 168 documents after passing the initial results through various filters. VOSviewer software was used to analyze the information, which enabled the creation of bibliometric citation, co-citation and co-word maps. The results reveal the most relevant authors and studies on this subject and identify the most current studies, the main topic of which deals with sustainability and corporate social responsibility, in addition to highlighting the characteristics of women that are of vital importance to boards of directors within the current context: empathy, open innovation, concern for the needs of interest groups and a heightened perception of risks.

Women’s Presence on Corporate Boards: Addressing Director Selection, Participation, and Gender Bias

“…A holistic literature review of gender diversity on boards presented three different groupings of research over time (Sánchez-Teba et al, 2021). The authors identified early research from 1994-2005 that studied gender differences and whether gender bias existed.…”

“…Board processes and communication have been studied less intensely and merely mention the lack of gender diversity (Boshoff, Van der Bank, & Malan 2019). Despite greater attention to gender diversity of boards, gender bias has not been the direct focus of research, but it is often mentioned as the reason for low presence of women on boards (Huang et al, 2019;Sánchez-Teba et al, 2021).…”

Looking into Corporate Boardrooms Through the Lens of Gender Diversity: A Bibliometric Review and META Analysis

“…Although there is no dearth of research in the field of corporate board diversity, there is a lack of credible bibliometric and META analysis identifying the research gap and providing the summary of the articles published in the field. Some of the most notable studies providing the bibliometric analysis of boardroom gender diversity includes [11,12,[16][17][18][19]. None of this study provides a comprehensive overview of the literature on corporate boardroom through the gender diversity.…”

Bibliographic analysis: the trends of gendered sustainable energy studies

“…Thus, the main objective of this paper is to identify the research characteristics of gender issue in sustainable energy studies by utilizing the bibliometric techniques on gendered sustainable energy publications indexed in the Web of Science (WoS) database. A bibliometric analysis is used to understand the general panorama of a certain topic and identify its emerging research potentials [8]. We found several bibliometric studies portraying the gender subject within several context, such as Strumia [9] who used inSpire database to conduct IOP Publishing doi:10.1088/1755-1315/1105/1/012001 2 bibliometric analysis on gender in physics studies and Sánchez-Teba et al [8] who focus on mapping the studies of gender diversity among boards of directors.…”