New Evidence on Board Gender Diversity from a Large Panel of European Firms

Abstract: 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.