espite comprising a large share of the workforce, women remain a minority in corporate boardrooms across Europe. This issue has generated heated debates across the world and has prompted several countries to mandate gender quotas for companies. For example, in Norway, large and medium-size firms are mandated to guarantee that both women and men account for at least 40 percent of board members.
Given the increasing proliferation of mandated gender board quotas across countries, it is imperative that the public be aware of the main facts concerning gender board diversity.
While public (listed) companies often report the gender breakdown of their board members, obtaining data for private (non-listed) companies is much more challenging. Yet understanding the diversity picture in private companies is crucial as they make up the largest part of the economy, and are often beyond the scope of any quota or reporting legislation.
To shed light on this topic, researchers from the Group for Research in Applied Economics (GRAPE) and the University of Warsaw, funded by Norwegian Financial Mechanism, combined data about nearly 59 million individuals who sit on management and supervisory boards across over 29 million firms from 43 European countries in the period between 1985 and 2020.
By applying a novel method based on cultural and linguistic heuristics, they were able to determine the gender of over 99 percent of the board members in their sample. For example, in some languages, such as Czech, surnames end with a gender-specific suffix, while in other languages, such as Polish, the first names of women end with a vowel.
This allowed them to create a comprehensive source of information, called the Gender Board Diversity Dataset (GBDD), covering both public and private companies. The data is described in a research paper published in Nature (Scientific Data).
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A key insight emerging from the GBDD is that, despite women holding on average 22 percent of all board positions in a given industry, more than two-thirds of all firms report no women in their boardrooms. More specifically, 68 percent of sectors across the European continent over the past several decades have not had a single firm with at least one woman in their boardrooms.
The absence of women is more acute in certain sectors than in others. The average firm-level share of women on corporate boards is only around 16 percent in the IT sector, while it is 35percent in the education, health and care (EHC) sector.
Breaking the data by country also shows significant differences. For example, firms with no female board members tend to be more prevalent in Poland than in Finland.
Generally, there was an increase in diversity in the 1990s, stagnation in the 2000s, and another increase in the 2010s.
However, in the case of supervisory boards, the recent increase in the proportion of female board members was not accompanied by an increase in the number of women on supervisory boards.
While the full explanation of this observation would require deeper research, one possible interpretation is that supervisory boards might have become smaller over time, with male board members accounting for most of the decline, thus mechanically increasing the share of female board members.
Despite the increase in gender diversity among company board members over the last three decades, the high prevalence of firms with no women on boards suggests the possibility that significant barriers to entry for women still exist.
Policymakers interested in fostering an inclusive and fair society could focus their attention on understanding and removing country- and sector- specific barriers to board participation faced by women.
The GBDD can be used by researchers and non-researchers alike to gain further insights into this topic, and can help ensure that policies aimed at promoting gender board diversity are grounded in scientific evidence.
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The writer is a PhD student at the University of Warsaw. His research lies at the intersection of economics and machine learning. The article is republished under a Creative Commons license.
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Publish date : 2025-01-09 18:34:00
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