1āGolden Times for Women on Boards?
Getting a seat at the board table has seemed a distant possibility for most women throughout history. Boardrooms have traditionally been dominated by an elite group of senior men, and women were absent from those boards. This started to change most notably when, in 2008, Norway became the first country to set a legal quota for women on boards. Across the world, there followed a flurry of activity to get more women on boards with or without some kind of quota or target. While the impetus and focus for women on boards seems to be generally well received, the approach of how to get women there diverged. Some countries, such as Norway, introduced a hard, legislative quota for women, while other countries, like the United Kingdom (UK), followed a voluntary approach, which was regarded as a collaboration between business and the government. This created a climate where it seemed almost a foregone conclusion that if you were a woman in a reasonably senior role, you would be sought to serve on a board.
In this book, we trace the pathways of women and men searching for their first board roles. Through longitudinal interviews, we illustrate the subjective experiences of how these board-ready women and men make sense of their search for board roles and of their successes and failures to become directors. We shed light on how the right experience, personality and fit are discursively constructed, we show how strategic, yet subtle, networking is seen as essential to attain a board role, and we show how women lean in while men sit back on their journey to the boardroom. Overall, the book makes a contribution to understanding how aspiring board members make sense of the board appointment process in a climate where, publicly, there was emphasis on appointing more women to boards of directors.
Women on BoardsāAn Apparent Success Story
The focus on women on boards is often constructed as a success story. Following from Norwayās initial quota for women on boards, a wave of similar initiatives emerged. Some countries followed the Norway model of mandatory quotas for women on boards with sanctions (Wang and Kelan, 2013) while others used a softer approach to quotas without sanctions, such as in Spain, India and Malaysia (Kirsch, 2018). Yet others focused on voluntary action rather than mandatory quotas, such as in the UK. The UKās approach featured a governmental review (the āDavies Reviewā), setting a target of 25% women on boards for the Financial Times Stock Exchange (FTSE) 100, with five years to achieve it. The UKās focus on women on boards predated āBrexitā, the UKās expected departure from the European Union (EU) after the 2016 referendum; this is ironic given that the UKās action was driven by the threat of potential quotas being enshrined in an EU directive. At the point of writing, such a directive has not been introduced (Humbert et al., 2019).
While the increase of women on boards globally is rightly celebrated as a success, success has many fathers (and mothers), and many stakeholders claim credit for this achievement. Of course, all had a stake in pushing for changeālegislators, regulators, business leaders and politiciansāand the āwomen on boardsā campaign was notable for being spearheaded by women in leadership roles. Either way, it appears that the time was right to focus on getting women onto boards, and the change took place in a specific historic, social and political context. In the UK, the voluntary approach taken is often told as a success story that demonstrates that businesses can get more women into senior roles through a voluntary commitment if they just try hard enough.
The focus of women on boards at this time also exists in a wider context: it was constructed as a golden age for women in leadership. The media regularly ran stories about how women were wanted on boards and that board diversity was changing rapidly. The market responded: there sprung up a range of networking events and courses offered to women who aspire to board positions. Search firms were asked to locate women who can sit on boards. This led to the impression for many women that they just had to put themselves forward to get a board seat. Motivational books like Lean In (Sandberg, 2013) published around the time also espoused that if women can just have a bit more confidence, they could be successful. At the time, the possibility of portfolio careers, which afford individuals the opportunity to design their own work context by combining different projects, was also gaining prominence; board roles are quintessential examples of portfolio careers. Portfolio careers are constructed as particularly attractive for women because it allows them to schedule time for care work and leisure activities, which are often difficult to achieve in regular work structures, although research has questioned that optimistic view (Gill, 2002). Board roles, therefore, became an option that many women aspired to and invested substantially into developing themselves into board-ready candidates through attending courses and networking events. Simultaneously, the focus on women meant it appeared as though men would now struggle to get onto boards with women as new competition. Despite the belief that it was a good time to be a woman if one wants to get a seat at the boardroom table, recent figures suggest that 65% of all new appointments go to men and only 35% to women (Hampton and Alexander, 2018).
The success story of women on boards in the UK is made more complicated by two other key concerns. First, the progress made was largely in relation to non-executive directors. While the percentage of women in non-executive roles in FTSE 100 companies has increased from 15.6% in 2011 to 36.5% in 2018, the proportion of women in senior executive roles on boards has increased from 5.5% to 10.2% and remains low (Hampton and Alexander, 2018). This is understandable in such a short space of time: non-executive directors are part-time roles given to people external to the company; there is relatively regular turnover,1 and there is no fixed requirement on how many non-executives a board can have. As such, changing the gender balance can be done fairly simply: by adding one or two women into non-executive director roles. This is demonstrably easier than increasing the number of women in high-level executive positions, as typically only the chief executive officer (CEO) and chief financial officer (CFO) sit on the boards. In 2018, only six women were CEOs of FTSE 100 companies (Hampton and Alexander, 2018). Since 2015, the Hampton Alexander Review (2018) has focused on this issue through encouraging companies to declare their gender balance of executive committees (one level below the board) and in senior management.
A second issue with the women-on-boards agenda that is less frequently discussed lies in our understanding of how non-executive directors are found, appraised and chosen by boards. In 2011, at the time the Daviesā review was launched, it was suggested within the review that the appointment process is opaque, difficult to navigate and reliant on networks and that this contributes to the lack of women (Doldor et al., 2012). The Daviesā review, therefore, recommended that the process be made more rigorous, with the assumption that this would lead to more women being appointed (Davies, 2011, 2015). When the target was met in 2015, the question of whether the appointment process had become more rigorous was not raised. There is surprisingly little academic research that focuses on the board appointment perspective. When focusing on gender, research has tended to examine women directors, those who have āmade itā, and therefore tends to be dominated either by demographic analysis of those women directors or on how appointing women can have an effect on the board or the company.
The Research
In a climate where there was a strong demand for more women on boards, it was assumed by many that it would be relatively easy for women to get board positions. At the same time, anecdotal evidence suggested that it still took women longer to get a board position than men and that the process was more difficult, while a great deal of academic research suggested that there was still bias towards men. This contradiction was at the heart of the research that forms the basis for this book. In order to shed light on the gender dimension of the appointment process, we designed a qualitative, in-depth and longitudinal study to help us understand the subjective experiences of women and men on the way to their first board roles.
As we were interested in the process, the study was longitudinal, interviewing aspiring board members three times while they were seeking board roles. The approach was prospective to ensure that we did not simply replicate the research that looks at women who have made it onto boards but rather looks at individuals who had a realistic chance of being board members as they were trying to get access to roles. This was supported by an executive search firm, Sapphire Partners, which has a lot of experience in both gender and board appointments.
The research followed the experiences of 30 aspirant directors, 15 men and 15 women, by interviewing them three times over a period of two years. The interviewees were all people who, by their own admission, were seeking to gain a non-executive director role on a FTSE 350 board. They came from a range of industry backgrounds, and the majority were based in London, UK. They were aged between 40 and 70 years old and all were white. The interviews were held in a variety of places in London, with some interviews conducted over the phone. With the interviewees permission, the interviews were all audio recorded. They were then fully transcribed and analysed.
The research approach was social constructionist in that we were interested in how gender is constructed in the board appointment process. We, therefore, used a discourse analysis to analyse the interviews. Discourse analysis is the search for patterns in language in the form of ācommon senseā structures or interpretive repertoires (Edley, 2001; Wetherell, 1998) and examining language āas usedā (Taylor, 2001): the commonality of patterns and their discursive function and effect. This was done first by hand and then later using qualitative data analysis software. From this analysis, and our analysis of the literature, there emerged three key areas of focus. First, it became clear that there was a narrow perspective on what makes an āidealā board member, and that this is restrictive to diverse candidates. Second, we found that networking was seen as an essential part of the process but that the social expectations around what constitutes āacceptableā networking excludes those who are not already in the right network. These expectations are also gendered and disadvantage women. Third, we found that the women-on-boards agenda engendered a belief that men were no longer being chosen, while, during that time, nearly three-quarters of roles still went to men. As well as illuminating the appointment process and how it is exclusionary to diversity, this research also demonstrates the importance of taking a broader perspective on gender and moving away from a conception that is solely focused on which bodies occupy a certain role.
Structure of the Book
The book is structured as follows. In Chapter 2, we outline the current research on women on boards to provide an understanding framework for this research and what is already known about directors, how they are appointed and what explanations have been used until now to explain womenās absence. In Chapter 3, we then discuss the findings from this research, showing how the ideal director is conceptualised and how that concept is gendered. Chapter 4 focuses on networking practices to examine how women are included and excluded. In Chapter 5, we consider the wider views candidates have about the process and how these views have discursive effects: women are expected to push forward or ālean inā to get roles while men sit back, while men and women alike believe that it is easier for women. The sixth chapter offers a summary and conclusion by demonstrating how a gendered view of the appointment process is essential to understand the board appointment process fully.
Conclusion
The topic of women on boards has garnered a lot of media, practitioner and academic interest in recent years. The scarcity of women on boards is often lamented, but some countries and regions have started to take proactive action in the form of quotas or voluntary commitments. This creates the impression that there is a lot of demand for women, but it also encourages supply by signalling to women that a board position is just within reach. In this book, we look at the board appointment process from the perspective of aspiring board candidates to explore the subjective experiences of women and men who seek a board appointment. Thereby we aim to reduce the opacity of board appointment processes and shed new light on the gender-board relationship.
Note
2 Gender and Corporate Boards
Over recent decades, gender on corporate boards of directors has attracted significant scholarly interest, and it is thus not surprising that there is a plethora of academic articles and books that have been published on the topic. An excellent summary is provided by Kirsch (2018) in her systematic review of the field, which outlines how extant research falls into four main areas. First, scholars have analysed whether women on boards are different from men on boards. Second, research tries to understand those factors that shape womenās appointments to boards and board gender composition. Third, researchers have analysed how women on boards affect organisational outcomes both internal and external. Fourth, research has explored the relationship between regulation and board diversity. Our research falls within the second stream, and we focus particularly on micro-level aspects in that our analysis centred on the search for board roles and the appointment process. Our interest is thus on social processes as they relate to board appointments. In particular, we focus on areas around human capital, the skills directors need to be on boards, the notion of fit and the importance of visibility and networking as part of the board appointment process. Our review of the literature is thus selective rather than exhaustive; we focus on aspects of the literature that connect to the analysis of the interview material. In particular, we suggest that research on gender and boards has paid insufficient attention to the sense-making practices of women and men on their journey to the boardroom.
Why So Few?
Being a director of a company is often seen as the crowning achievement for corporate leaders (Stern and Westphal, 2010; Sheridan et al., 2015). Boards or āboards of directorsā are a group of individuals who work at the top of organisations. Here we have focused on corporate boardsāboards of companiesābut boards are also required on charities and other kinds of non-profit organisation. Boardsā make-up, structure, role and responsibilities varies from country to country according to national regulation and business law, but they can be broadly understood as a group of individuals who are collectively responsible for the long-term success of the company (Financial Reporting Council, 2018: p. 7). Some countries, such as Germany, have dual board structures with a management board and a supervisory board. In a unitary board structure, such as the UK, a board has two to four executive directors (Lowe et al., 2017), most commonly the CEO and CFO, and an equal or greater number of ānon-executiveā or independent directors1 who are responsible for monitoring the behaviour and decision making of the executive directors. Executive roles are full-time positions often taken by individuals who have worked up through a company or moved laterally from another, while non-executive roles are part-time (typically 10ā40 days a year), and the nature of the work is focused largely around board meetings. Individuals will often hold more than one role on a number of boards or may hold a non-executive role alongside a full-time career.
Across the globe, women hold 17.3% of all directorships, and it is estimated that it will take at least until 2028 before women hold 30% of all directorships2 (Eastman, 2017). The absence of women on corporate boards of directors has been highlighted as a key issue in the last two decades: in academic literature, media reports and wider societal discourse (see, for example, Aluchna and Aras, 2018; De Anca and Gabaldon, 2014; Fagan et al., 2012; Devnew, 2018; Post and Byron, 2014; Seierstad and Opsahl, 2011; Seierstad et al., 2017; Torchia et al., 2011). The relatively small number of women in these roles is widely regarded as an issue that businesses and countries need to address, both from a utilitarian perspective and a social justice perspective. The utilitarian perspective suggests that the lack of women on boards is an issue because there is a ābusiness caseā for women directors; women are an untapped pool of potential talent that can improve the way the board or company functions, either through their own contribution or through increasing the diversity of boards and reducing the likelihood of groupthink (Nielsen and Huse...
