The management professor finds strategic leaders are key to having corporate boards with more than token gender diversity.
A study co-authored by Mark Mallon, assistant professor of strategic management in the Martha and Spencer Love School of Business, examines how strategic corporate leaders play an important role in meaningfully diversifying corporate boards.
In the Strategic Management Journal article “Beyond tokenism: How strategic leaders influence more meaningful gender diversity on boards,” Mallon and co-authors Orhun Guldiken and Stav Fainshmidt, College of Business, Florida International University; and William Q. Judge, Strome College of Business, Old Dominion University; explain that having female corporate executives and younger board members are among the factors that increase board gender diversity.
“In this study,” write the authors, “we take an exploratory approach to address how strategic corporate leaders affect female board director appointments beyond the potentially tokenistic first one and to understand what differentiates boards that retain limited, potentially tokenistic, gender diversity and boards that more genuinely diversify their composition by appointing additional female directors.
“Using longitudinal data on U.S. firms, we find that having more female top managers and having the sole female director serve on the nominating committee increase the likelihood of additional female director appointments.
“A greater number of female top managers can reflect the CEO's preference for gender diversity, meaning the CEO will also likely lobby for more female directors on the board beyond just one. When the sole female director serves on the nominating committee, it can disrupt past practices and help ensure more female candidates are considered for board vacancies.
“In addition, boards and nominating committees with younger members amplify these effects. Younger board and committee members have more exposure to female strategic leaders than older members who spent most of their careers at times when female strategic leaders were much less prevalent.”
The Strategic Management Journal (SMJ), the official journal of the Strategic Management Society, is consistently rated one of the top publications in the management area and publishes papers that are selected through a rigorous double-blind review process. It is included on the Financial Times's list of the Top 50 business journals and the University of Texas-Dallas's list of 24 leading business journals used to rank the top 100 business schools.