A range of policy recommendations mandating gender board quotas is based on the idea that "women help women". We analyze potential gender diversity spillovers from supervisory to top managerial positions over three decades in Europe. Contrary to previous studies which worked with stock listed firms or were region locked, we use a large data base of roughly 2 000 000 firms. We find evidence that women do not help women in corporate Europe, unless the firm is stock listed. Only within public firms, going from no woman to at least one woman on supervisory position is associated with a 10-15% higher probability of appointing at least one woman to the executive position. This pattern aligns with various managerial theories, suggesting that external visibility influences corporate gender diversity practices. The study implies that diversity policies, while impactful in public firms, have limited effectiveness in promoting gender diversity in corporate Europe.

1. Genderboarddiversityspilloversandthepubliceye
Hubert Drazkowski Bram Timmermans Joanna Tyrowicz Sebastian Zalas
FAME|GRAPE DIG, NHH University of Warsaw, IZA University of Warsaw
Motivation and mechanisms
So far:
• Consensus: "women help women" (spillovers)
=⇒ governments mandate gender board quotas
• Previous studies:
=⇒ focused on listed (public) firms
=⇒ typically one country
=⇒ not all types of spillovers were studied
Our question: do spillovers emerge in private firms?
We add to the existing literature:
1. Novel and vast dataset (GBDD)
• spanning 1990-2020 & covering ≈ 2,000,000 firms
• 29 European countries
2. Study gender board diversity spillovers from supervisory
positions to top management juxtaposing:
• public (stock-listed)
• and private (not listed) firms
We theorize: private firms face no public eye pressure such as reporting to the regulator and the public opinion.
Main result: positive spillovers only when scrutiny of the public eye
womanM
i,t = α0 + βwomanS
i,t−1 + δprivatei,t + γprivatei,t × womanS
i,t−1 + ξcontrolsi,t + ϵi,t,
where M - management, S - supervisory
Binscatter of measures residualized (all controls included). Results of panel A, column (4)
• Stock-listed: (β) No woman on S(upervisory)
→ at least one woman on S(upervisory)
→ [10, 15] p.p. ([6,12] p.p.) ∆ proba-
bility of appointing at least one woman to the
management (executive) position
• Not listed: (β+δ+γ) No woman on
S(upervisory) → at least one woman on
S(upervisory)
→ [-3, 3] p.p. ([-1,4] p.p.) ∆ probabil-
ity of appointing at least one woman to the
management (executive) position
Woman in management board in t (1) (2) (3) (4)
Panel A: S comprises of all board members not assigned to management (executive) board
Woman in S in t − 1 (β) -0.011*** 0.16*** 0.12*** 0.091***
(-18.45) (20.40) (7.52) (6.09)
Private (not listed) in t (δ) 0.039*** 0.00014 0.022
(6.03) (0.01) (1.14)
× Woman in S in t − 1 (γ) -0.17*** -0.16*** -0.14***
(-22.08) (-9.87) (-9.24)
# of observations / # of firms 11,370,748 / 1,940,368 10,077,335 / 1,821,875
% of firms w/ 1+ woman (private/public) 0.21 / 0.29
Panel B: S consists only of supervisory (non-executive) board members
Woman in S in t − 1 (β) 0.036*** 0.13*** 0.085*** 0.059**
(17.72) (13.16) (3.21) (2.32)
Private (not listed) in t (δ) 0.0013 -0.022 0.025
(0.15) (-0.40) (0.46)
× Woman in S in t − 1 (γ) -0.10*** -0.099*** -0.084***
(-10.13) (-3.63) (-3.19)
# of observations / # of firms 658,596 / 140,650 594,874 / 133,127
% of firms w/ 1+ woman (private/public) 0.24 / 0.34
Fixed effects (firm, sector, time) - - YES YES
HHI, Country weights - - YES YES
Self-promotion, log(board size) - - - YES
Empirical strategy
We estimate spillovers from gender board diversity to top management positions across firms in 29 European countries
1. We use novel GBDD data (Drazkowski et al., 2023):
→ covers private firms (in addition to public firms).
→ provides gender of all board members for both
M(anagement, executive) and S(upervisory, non-
executive) boards.
→ thanks to deploying a novel set of heuristics, the data
goes back to 1990.
2. In a sample restricted to public firms, the conventional
result of spillovers from S(upervisory) to M(anagement)
fully replicate (Matsa & Miller 2011). In fact, the di-
versity spillovers from non-executive to executive positions
are positive.
Binscatter of redisualized values
3. Main result: obtain estimates of gender board diversity
spillovers from supervisory to management separately for
public (listed) firms and private (not listed) firms.
• We adjust the estimates for fixed effects for firm (or
sector) and time. Thus, we exclude common trends
and exploit variation due to uncommon shocks (de-
viations from common trends).
• Our specifications include controls: concentration
measures (we take the Hirschman-Hehrfindahl In-
dex), and the size of the boards (in logs) + weights
(for country size);
• Our estimates exclude the cases of self-promotion
(when a given person in the supervisory position
moves to a management position).
→ BOX TO THE RIGHT REPORTS THE RESULTS
4. Public eye pressure is not a statistical artifact. To contex-
tualize our results, we run a placebo test: until recently,
there were more men by the name of John on boards of
NYSE-listed companies than all women
→ We use the same specifications as in our main estima-
tion, but instead of gender board diversity spillovers, we
study board spillovers of the most popular men’s names: 3
popular male names in 1960’s, as it is plausible for those
men to be experienced enough to sit in the boards.
→ There should be no spillovers, so if any correlations
emerge, they capture noise (and possibly mean reversion
in popularity of names).
→ The results (main result: left, placebo: right)
• Both in private and public there are negative
spillovers for name homophilia.
• However, magnitudes of slopes are of similar size
for gender diversity. This suggests that although
women help women in listed firms, they do so more
less the same as men not helping men.
Acknowledgements
We thank FAME|GRAPE and NHH teams for valuable comments. This paper was written within the scope of Norwegian Financial
Mechanism 2014-2021, project number # 2019/34/H/HS4/00481, whose support is gratefully acknowledged. The remaining errors
are ours.