Gender spillovers from supervisory boards to management boards

Abstract

This study investigates gender spillovers from women on supervisory boards to women on management boards in a two‐tier system with employee codetermination. The supervisory board consists of a nominating committee mainly responsible for the appointment of directors in the management board. By combining similarity attraction theory with power theory, we predict that only female shareholder representatives who serve on the nominating committee drive the positive effect on the presence of women on management boards. The results of the correlated random effects models in a sample of 95 German codetermined and publicly listed companies (2009–2016) confirm the predicted relationship.

Board leadership, board meeting frequency and firm performance in two‐tier boards

“…These results indicate that, in general, female independent directors bring different skills, values, and experiences to the board, thereby providing increased access to resources and connections to the external environment, as postulated by resource dependence theory (Hillman et al, 2007; Post & Byron, 2015; Wahid, 2018). Our finding is in line with previous studies, which have also found that female independent directors are better monitors (Bozhinov et al, 2021) and attend more board meetings than their male counterparts (Adams & Ferreira, 2008, 2009, 2012). The positive but nonsignificant result found in Indonesia, where the institutional environment is less developed and weaker in governance, suggests that a less diverse board with fewer female independent directors reduces their influence, causing female independent directors to have less “voice.” Hence, they are unable to lobby for a higher board meeting frequency (Schwartz‐Ziv, 2017; Usman et al, 2018).…”

“…For example, female independent directors bring fresh viewpoints and tend to be more independent in their thinking than their male peers because they are not a part of the “old boys' club” (Carter et al, 2003; Fan et al, 2019). In addition, female independent directors allocate more effort to monitoring activities (Adams & Ferreira, 2008, 2009; Bozhinov et al, 2021), because women are generally more risk averse and less tolerant of opportunistic behaviors than men (Huang & Kisgen, 2013; Jiang et al, 2016). In fact, Adams and Ferreira (2009) found that female directors have better attendance in meetings and are more likely to attend monitoring‐related committees than male directors.…”

“…Supporting the notion of greater monitoring efforts by women, Schwartz‐Ziv (2017) provided evidence that boards with at least three female directors are more likely to request further information or an update on the subject discussed and to take the initiative after board meetings. As such, since they are more active monitors (Bozhinov et al, 2021) and less tolerant of opportunistic behaviors compared to their male counterparts, female independent directors are more likely to encourage a greater frequency of board meetings in order to create more opportunities and time for executing their monitoring duties. Therefore:H4 Female independent directors are positively related to board meeting frequency.…”

Resilience, Leadership and Female Entrepreneurship within the Context of SMEs: Evidence from Latin America

“…On the other hand, some works underline that female leadership could be a limiting factor for the fulfillment of business objectives [66,67] and that the exercise of their functions could assume negative traits. Other researchers, such as [68], emphasize instead the positive perception related to female leadership, which is characterized by personal security, independence, altruism, the entrepreneurial woman capable of creating change, and the ability to transform work into a vocation.…”

Critical Masses and Gender Diversity in Voluntary Sport Leadership: The Role of Economic and Social State-Level Factors

“…For example, spillover effects were found from state government spending unrelated to sport [41] and state government quality (macro level) [43] on individual sport participation (micro level). In the corporate sector, positive spillover effects regarding gender diversity within a company were found to occur from women on supervisory boards to women on management boards [44]. Other studies reported negative spillover effects from the share of women in higher job levels to the share of women in lower job levels [45], suggesting that empirical evidence regarding gender diversity related to spillover effects is not consistent.…”