Proceedings of the International Association for Business and Society

Volume 19, 2008

Proceedings of the Nineteenth Annual Meeting

Country Institutional Context as an Antecedent of Female Board Representation
An Empirical Study

In this study, we set out to examine the role played by country institutional environments in explaining cross-country variation in the prevalence of women on corporate boards of directors. In order to address this question, we compare the predictive power and substantive implications of four existing typologies of national institutional environments due to Hall and Soskice (2001), La Porta et al., (1999), Weimar and Pape’s (1999), and Whitley (1991, 1996, 1999). These frameworks encapsulate a variety of national institutional characteristics and provide a means to a) evaluate the significance of national institutional environments for the presence of women on boards, and b) distinguish between the importance of various specific aspects of country institutional environments for board diversity. Our findings show that as much as half of the variation across countries in the presence of women on corporate boards is attributable to institutional factors and that legally-oriented institutions appear to play the most significant role in shaping board diversity.