The Gender Diversity Imitation Game: The Role Of Board Interlocks

We show the role that board interlocks play in the diffusion of company strategies on the proportion of Women on Boards. We analyze two networks of more than 12,000 American and 6,500 European companies from 1999 to 2015. We obtained evidence that companies imitate each other on appointing women to boards. Results point towards mimetic adaptation whereby those companies with a higher proportion of women on boards experiment a pressure to reduce it further than when the proportion is lower, and the pressure is to improve it. This asymmetry is the result of competing forces within the interlocking directorates, where the opposition to change that comes from some actors in the board networks obstruct faster diffusion. Finally, we observe how this asymmetric behavior vanishes in the presence of strong coercive pressures, such as mandatory gender quotas, although not in the presence of gender diversity recommendations in countries’ corporate governance codes.