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Representation of women on boards is getting more and more attention these recent years (Hillman, Shropshire, & Cannella, 2007; Nielsen & Huse, 2010), all the more as recent influence by the legislator accelerates the pace of change. Indeed, in France, a new law adopted in January 2011 stated that the proportion of female directors should not be lower than 40% in all major companies.

Most previous research focused on the impact of the presence of women in boards on performance, but there are few studies on female directors' networks. In order to help to better understand the ties at the origin of these networks, we study several characteristics and network ties of female directors of French companies belonging to the SBF 120 index and we compare them with male characteristics. We test the specificity of four types of board of directors' networks: attendance at the same elite educational institutions, use of business networks, civil servants' networks, and interlocking directorates.

Our findings suggest that female directors' networks tend to find their origin in business networks more than men. Conversely, male directors have more board interlocking and are more often graduated from elite schools than women. These results show that female directors' networks have specific origins in comparison with men's ones. The exploration of this specificity could be an asset to better understand the role and influence of female directors' networks in governance.

The Indian Companies Act (2013) mandates the appointment of at least one woman director for large publicly listed companies in India in order to increase gender diversity on corporate boards. The study analyzes the relationship between corporate governance mechanisms, board gender diversity, and ownership structure on dividend payout decisions in an emerging economy like India. The study uses data collected for nonfinancial firms listed on NSE (National Stock Exchange) 500 in India from the period 2008 to 2020. Contrary to the evidence from developed economies, the study finds that increased female representation and greater proportion of female independent directors on the board are associated with lower dividend payout decisions in the Indian context. As it stands, the female representation on corporate boards in India is woefully low and appears to be mere tokenism. The study explores the role of regulation in increasing gender diversity on corporate boards and offers insights from an emerging economy where such a regulation is in place.

How do families-in-business deal with intergenerational female succession in their company’s corporate governance structures, i.e., the board of directors? How is female boardroom capital built up? This chapter explores the boardroom immersion processes and mentorship programs followed by 44 Mexican and Spanish next-gen women owners of 2nd, 3rd, and 4th generation, privately-owned, national and international firms, who were appointed for the first time to their family business’ board of directors between 2005 and 2020.

Our outcomes show that intergenerational female corporate governance succession is driven more by particular families-in-business matters, like the inheritance of ownership rights, than by corporate governance codes or soft legislation. We discovered that next-generation women owners are more likely to be appointed for the first time to their family business boardroom when they’re between ages of 38 and 47. Ninety percent (90%) of them will be appointed at or before 57. Our findings also reveal that 4th generation female owners are immersed in the boardroom at a younger age.

When analyzing the immersion processes, we noticed too that due to limited business socialization during their upbringing, some of these well-­educated, professionally qualified females had to cope with holding legal ownership (potestas) in the family firm but missing business decision-making legitimacy (auctoritas) in the governance structure. Based on our results, we developed a families-in-business female boardroom capital development framework to help them achieve both: potestas and auctoritas, as well as to facilitate next-generation women owners’ boardroom incorporation in family enterprises.

In this paper we use a large linked employer-employee data set on German establishments between 1993 and 2012 to investigate how the gender composition of the top layer of management affects a variety of establishment and worker outcomes. We use two different measures to identify the gender composition of the top layer based on direct survey data: the fraction of women among top managers, and the fraction of women among working proprietors. We document the following facts: (a) There is a strong negative association between the fraction of women in the top layer of management and several establishment outcomes, among them business volume, investment, total wage bill per worker, total employment, and turnover; (b) Establishments with a high fraction of women in the top layer of management are more likely to implement female-friendly policies, such as providing childcare facilities or promoting and mentoring female junior staff; (c) The fraction of women in the top layer of management is also negatively associated with employment and wages, both male and female, full-time and part-time. However, all of these associations vanish when we include establishment fixed effects and establishment-specific time trends. This reveals a substantial sorting of female managers across establishments: small and less productive establishments that invest less, pay their employees lower wages, but are more female-friendly are more likely to be led by women.

This study investigates the effect of corporate governance mechanisms and country-level factors on the extent of Internet Financial Reporting (IFR). We used a sample of 106 listed firms from five African countries. A financial reporting disclosure index was used to compute the aggregate IFR scores, which are made up of two components: content and presentation. Our results indicate that IFR relates to board size, firm size, country-level governance, economic development and index return. These results evidence the predominance of country-level factors over firm-specific factors in explaining the extent of IFR in Africa. It also shows that corporate governance mechanisms via board practices are insufficient to explain IFR in Africa. By further extending our analysis into the two components of IFR, we find that factors affecting the content and presentation dimensions are different. This study is among the first to investigate the extent of IFR in several African countries and adds to the existing evidence that has mainly focussed on firm-specific factors.

The psychological analysis of strategic management issues has gained a great deal of momentum in recent years. Much can be learned by entering the black box of strategic thinking of senior executives and bring new insights on how they see, make sense of, and interpret their everyday strategic experiences. This chapter will focus on a powerful cognitive mapping tool called the Repertory Grid Technique and demonstrate how it has been used in the strategy literature along with how a new and more refined application of the technique can enhance the elicitation of complex strategic cognitions for strategy and Board of Directors research.