Applicant
Thierry Rossier
Funded by
SNF Return CH Postdoc.Mobility, see Project Page
Duration
2022-2023
The topic of women’s representation on company boards has been widely debated, especially because several European countries have recently implemented quotas to increase women directors’ presence. A recent strain of literature emerged to criticise the effects of quotas and highlight persisting gendered inequalities regarding women’s integration at the top of corporate decisional power related to prominent positions within the most central companies and to a presence among elite corporate actors, who have an impact on the whole corporate sector and on state economic policies. This literature calls for more systematic and comparative research on gendered dynamics on company boards and on the network mechanisms that prevent women’s integration into corporate elites.
This project aims to study the network processes that lead to gendered inequalities among board directors by considering the case of four comparable, yet diverse, small European countries (Denmark, Norway, Switzerland, the Netherlands). It is divided into two interrelated research studies focusing on women’s power integration and engages in a comparison of countries over ten years. It looks at the effects of gender homophily on corporate networks (S1) and at the factors explaining gendered integration into the business inner circle, the most powerful group in the network (S2).
This project applies, for the first time, a comparative strategy, between different national gender regimes, on gendered inequalities in corporate networks.This research is carried out in close collaboration with Prof. Eric Davoine (University of Fribourg and co-leader of a Sinergia project on the local and transnational power of elites). It builds on a company database to gather information on each country’s top 1,000 companies and their board directors over ten years. First, it builds different corporate networks and uses exponential random graph models to test whether gender homophily has an effect on network structure. It seeks to identify a hypothetical tipping point over time and countries where the ratio of women is high enough to secure their integration. Second, it identifies the inner circle through a k-core decomposition procedure and investigates how much gender explains belonging to this very central group through linear regressions.
The results are expected to vary between national cases, company characteristics and individual network profiles.Scientifically, this project results in a much needed systematic comparison of the gendered structure of corporate networks. It provides new insights on women’s positions in corporate networks and constitutes a frame to deepen the study of gendered inequalities and the gendered careers and resources within corporate power. It promotes interdisciplinarity by addressing cross-cutting issues between sociology and management and targets publications in outlets situated between both fields. It provides a reproducible methodology to study women’s integration into corporate power. It results in collaborations in the University of Fribourg’s Department of Management and profits from exchanges with research teams based in different countries. It aims to get other researchers and the public to understand new dimensions of gendered inequalities among the most powerful corporate actors and to strengthen collaborations between researchers working on corporate elites, diversity management and gendered studies.
