Women in large European companies hold fewer than 30% of corporate leadership positions, and progress toward greater gender diversity in leadership has begun to slow. In response, European governments have introduced corporate boardroom quotas to promote more equal representation of women in leadership roles, with the expectation that increased representation at the top would trickle down to improve women’s career opportunities at lower organizational levels and spill over to organizations not directly targeted by these policies. However, it remains unclear to what extent quotas succeed in achieving these broader equality goals, and whether their effects vary across organizations. Beyond Boardrooms is the first systematic research project to address these questions and examine how quota policies affect gender equality within and across organizations.
The project investigates how quotas influence women’s access to corporate leadership positions and shape HR policies and practices. It further examines the extent to which these effects trickle down to reduce gender earnings inequality and occupational sex segregation, as well as the degree to which they spill over across organizations. To do so, the project studies a previously unexplored context: the Netherlands. The study considers the impact of two quota-related regulations, the corporate diversity target (2013-2020) and the corporate quota (2022-2024). We will construct the Netherlands Integrated Database of Inequality in Organizations (NIDIO), a unique data infrastructure that combines (1) administrative register and survey data on the earnings, occupations, and employment histories of Dutch organizational leaders and employees, and (2) business register data on organizational characteristics. We complement these large-scale data sources with in-depth interviews with executive search firms and HR representatives to gain a deeper understanding of the organizational practices through which quotas shape gender equality.
The vision of Beyond Boardrooms is to generate important insights into the effects of past and ongoing regulatory efforts and to provide evidence-based guidance for improving quota regulations and corporate strategies aimed at advancing gender equality.
