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Diversity in board composition, in particular the underrepresentation of women, has received significant attention over recent years in many sectors, including sport. Within British horseracing, whilst some maintain that the industry operates consistently as a meritocracy, others argue that women remain underrepresented at senior levels. This chapter explores arguments for increasing the number of women on boards and governing bodies, covering the business case and the ways that ‘substantive’ and ‘descriptive’ representation might embed sustained structural change. It draws on a research study which identified a lack of gender balance in many of horseracing's governing structures. Though emerging from its history as ‘mainly a male world’, structural barriers to impede women's progress remained evident. Women were found to experience a lack of role models, limited access to the mentoring and networking they needed to navigate the industry, and gender stereotyping. The response to these findings resulted in an industry plan for change, instigated by the British Horseracing Authority. This included the introduction of a specialist advisory body, targets for increased women's representation, diversity data collection and analysis, and support for role model and mentoring initiatives. These activities are reviewed herein using the organisational theoretical approaches of ‘institutional theory’, which identifies external pressures to conform to accepted business practice; ‘resource dependency theory’ and the role of inter-organisational arrangements; and ‘network theory’ analysing interdependencies with other organisations. I conclude by evaluating the potential impact of this work for achieving more gender-balanced governance.

Computable general equilibrium, or CGE, is a well-established numerical simulation technique for evaluating the economy-wide effects of changes in an economic system. It has become very widely used throughout the economics discipline, but is perhaps employed most frequently in the analysis of changes in international trade policy, where changes in tariffs and other taxes are often large and almost always involve multiple sectors and/or regions simultaneously. CGE methods, while certainly not without their limitations, have proved very effective at tracking the myriad of feedback and flow-through effects associated with new regional trading agreements and multilateral trade reforms, and have provided a consistent mechanism of analyzing the effects of changes in trade policy and related areas on a diverse range of economic outcomes.