Using a unique database of over 20 million firms over two decades, we examine industry sector and national institution drivers of the prevalence of women directors on supervisory and management boards in both public and private firms across advanced and emerging European economies. We demonstrate that gender board diversity has generally increased, yet women remain rare in both boards: approximately 70% of European firms have no women directors on their supervisory boards, and 60% have no women directors on management boards. We leverage institutional and resource dependency theoretical frameworks to demonstrate that few systematic factors are associated with greater gender diversity for both supervisory and management boards among both private and public firms: the same factor may exhibit a positive correlation to a management board, and a negative correlation to a supervisory board, or vice versa. We interpret these findings as evidence that country-level gender equality and cultural institutions exhibit differentiated correlations with the presence of women in management and supervisory boards. We also find little evidence that sector-level competition and innovativeness are systematically associated with presence of women on either board in either group of firms.

1. Genderdiversityonboards
Siri Terjesen Joanna Tyrowicz Jakub Mazurek
FAU, NHH IAAEU, FAME|GRAPE, IZA FAME|GRAPE
Implicit policy prescription: if ↑ x →↑ ♀ on S in listed rms, ↑ x →↑ ♀ women for all rms in M
Not true! No country level characteristics correlate systematically with gender board diversity. [ No good-for-all drivers].
We study gender board diversity for 20+ million rms, 30+ years and 40+ countries
We separate listed (public and hence monitored) and non-listed (private) companies. We separate supervisory and management board. [Quotas!]
−→ Tailored policies needed, as barriers are country specic.
Concern: few ♀ in top M
1. Gender equal countries have more diversity
Adams Kirchmayer (2013, 2016)
2. ↑ women in S jobs −→ women in M jobs ↑
Matsa Miller (2011, 2013)
What can we add? Great new data
Use (8 waves of) Amadeus data (100 mio rm-years over nearly 3 decades)
• Go beyond listed rms (→ public monitoring) −→ novel method for gender assignment
• Cross-country: delineate between supervisory to management boards
• Over time: increasing presence of women
Gender and board assignment
Exact names of board(s) members + linguistic rules = heuristics to identify gender
• H1: in some languages gender directly identiable e.g. vowel ending names in some Slavic languages, -ova
in Czech, etc.
• H2: the books of names e.g. dedicated lists for each of the Scandinavian languages
• Resolving conicts dropping impossible countries e.g. the Netherlands
• Manipulation check: 2010 2014 waves of Amadeus have salutations → out of 15,371,479 names,
misattributed: 10,626
Exact names of board(s) members
• Catalog positions in Amadeus and match them to law, country by country
• Iterate this process
Manipulation check: 2014 wave of Amadeus have boards → also ok.
How to measure diversity?
1. a rm level % of ♀ i on board
(unweighted average)
Matsa Miller (2011); Ahern Dittmar
(2012); Adams Kirchmaier (2016)
2. of ♀ on boards relative to of ♂
(weighted average)
Wolfers (2006); Adams Ferreira (2009)
3. % of rms that do have no ♀ on board
novel indicator
Amadeus data
• Comes from national information providers
• Typically full registry data: ownership de-
tails, NACE and board(s)
Prevalence of ♀: stylized facts
Firms with supervisory boards:
• have less ♀ M
• and more frequently have no ♀ in M
Unweighted average
Management boards (all) 22.55%
Management boards (with SB) 16.80%
Supervisory boards 23.30%
Weighted average
Management boards (all) 14.13%
Management boards (with SB) 16.99%
Supervisory boards 32.48%
% of rms with no women on board
Management boards (all) 70.86%
Management boards (with SB) 77.80%
Supervisory boards 59.11%
We tested country level and sector level factors
• Coecients change signs between listed | private and M | S, statistically dierent magnitudes
• The only consistent sign: tertiary enrollment of women (positive)
Summary of insights
Hypothesis: general openness to women should make it easier for them to be on S boards → M boards
• Nothing robust about women's labor markets equality, few factors consistent, low signicance
• Not much evidence for cultural values, no consistent patterns for competition or knowledge intensity
−→ Too much of a leap: institutional equality all around story not robust.
Data beyond stock-listed show more women in management than in supervisory
• Documented patterns: key role of rms with no women on boards: changes in corporate Europe =
changes in institutional Europe
• Women are becoming more numerous (and less infrequent) → changes in selectivity patterns or
changes in economy structure?
Thanks for your comments!
w: grape.org.pl
t: grape_org
f: grape.org
e: j.tyrowicz@grape.org.pl