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Women and Multiple Board Memberships: Social Capital and Institutional Pressure

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Abstract

We show unintended consequences of quota regulations to get women on boards. Board members may have different characteristics, and even among women, there are variations. We assume that the characteristics of the board members have an influence on their contributions to boards, to businesses as well as to society. In this paper, we argue that different types of societal pressure to get women on boards have an influence on the social capital characteristics of the women getting multiple board memberships. The paper is drawing on institutional theory and social capital theory, and we distinguish between mimetic, normative, and coercive types of pressure. Through a cluster analysis of 58 Italian “golden skirts”, we show that different types of societal pressure may lead to differences in social capital characteristics. The study has implications for the ongoing international debate about women and diversity on boards, and we propose developing a pressure theory for getting women on boards.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Economics and Management, University of Pisa, Via Cosimo Ridolfi 10, 56124, Pisa, Italy

    Alessandra Rigolini

  2. Department of Communication and Culture, BI Norwegian Business School, Nydalsveien 37, 0484, Oslo, Norway

    Morten Huse

Authors
  1. Alessandra Rigolini
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  2. Morten Huse
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Correspondence to Alessandra Rigolini.

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Appendices

Appendix 1

See Table 6.

Table 6 Variables definition and description
Full size table

Appendix 2: Additional Analyses

In order to understand the strength of the relationship hypothesized, we ran additional analyses on the full sample of women on boards in 2014. The population consisted of 463 women. For each of these women, we collected biographical information such as year of birth, nationality, and social capital characteristics. However, considering the size of the sample, it was not possible to examine the cv of each woman with the same level of depth as we did for the “golden skirts”. Thus, external databases (such as Bloomberg, Who’s Who, Ready for Board list and BoardEx) were used to collect missing information and to design variables. For the full sample of women we collected, as for the main sample, information about “Family Elite”, “Prestige Elite”, “Political Elite”, “Social Elite,” “Intellectual Elite,” and “Corporate Elite”. We did not collect information on “Bank Elite”, also because in the “golden skirts” sample this variable is the less representative of the social capital of women. For each woman, we also collected information on the multiple board memberships. In particular, we created a dummy variable (labeled Multiple Board Membership) that takes the value 1 if the woman has multiple board memberships, and 0 otherwise. We control for board size (labeled Board Size) which is the total number of members in the board. We also control for the number of women on board (labeled Women Number), which is the total number of women members in the board. In the Appendix I we report the table with variables definition and description.

In Table 7 we report the correlation matrix for the full sample of women on boards. In the table, we report for informative reasons descriptive statistics, pairwise Pearson correlation coefficients with two-tailed significance levels.

Table 7 Correlation matrix in additional analysis
Full size table

In the robustness check, each variable describing social capital of women included in the sample was regressed on the three dependent variables (mimetic pressure, normative pressure, coercive pressure). Since the dependent variables are dichotomous, we used logistic regression analyses. To capture the differences between industries, measured with a two-digit ATECO code, we included in our logistic regressions industry fixed effects.

In Table 8 we report results of logistic regression analyses.

Table 8 Main findings—full sample
Full size table

The results support the presence of a relationships between different types of institutional pressures and social capital characteristics of the women appointed.

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Rigolini, A., Huse, M. Women and Multiple Board Memberships: Social Capital and Institutional Pressure. J Bus Ethics 169, 443–459 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-019-04313-6

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