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This paper examines actors and discourses shaping new Canadian legislation designed to advance diversity in corporate governance.

This paper performs a stakeholder and discourse analysis drawing on texts of parliamentary debates.

The paper illuminates tensions regarding definitions of diversity, its importance for boards of directors and the mechanisms favoured for implementation. Official discourses examined show that, unlike for other political issues, opposition was largely muted, and most stakeholders engaged in the process supported legislation advancing diversity. Nonetheless areas of debate and positioning by actors and suggest important differences, with outcomes linked to non-traditional power bases.

This study provides insights into the discursive environments of organizations and processes relating to promoting diversity and equality in the political decision-making domain, a critical venue for understanding advancement of equity, often neglected in organizational studies.

By understanding the complex and competing discourses surrounding diversity and inclusion at the macro level this paper provides a context for understanding organizational (meso) and individual (micro) beliefs and behaviours.

This study shows how advocacy shapes how policy and legislation are framed and the ways mainstream organizations, including women's groups, may advance gender equality without regard to other dimensions of diversity or intersectionality.

This study maps the political discourse around recent Canadian legislation designed to improve diversity on boards that must, in the Canadian context, address more than gender.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the differences in the effects of gender equality legislation on employment outcomes among female and male workers in industries with different intensity of foreign investment (namely, foreign direct investment (FDI)-intensive industries and non–FDI–intensive industries). The specific employment outcomes that were studied to compare the effects of the legislation are the working hours, employment opportunities, and wages of female and male workers in Taiwan.

Using data from the annual Manpower Utilization Survey, the authors applied a differences-in-differences-in-differences estimation method to test the effect of gender equality legislation on employment outcomes. By using multinomial logit, the authors measured the effect of the legislation on employment opportunities. To correct for simultaneity and selectivity problems/biases, the authors adopted Heckman two-stage selection procedures. Likewise, the authors used weighted least squares to solve heteroskedasticity in the wage and working hour equations. Further, the instrumental variable (IV) method was used to correct for simultaneity bias in the equation on working hour. The authors applied three stages estimation method following Killingsworth’s (1983) approach to measure the effect of the legislation on wages and working hours.

The authors found the restrictions enforced by the gender equality legislation (namely the Gender Equal Employment Act (GEEA), enacted in 2002) in Taiwan to have made certain impact on the workers’ working conditions in FDI-intensive industries. The major finding indicated that in a country like Taiwan, where the legislature tried tilling the perpetual gender gap in its labour market, by passing a law to counter inequality, could finally narrow the gender gap in wages among workers in the FDI-intensive industries. Although initially after the enactment of the GEEA (between 2002 and 2004), the gender gap in part-timers’ wages has widened, yet over a period of time the gap in their wages too has narrowed down, particularly during 2005-2006. The legislation, however, could not improve the job opportunities for full-time female workers’ in FDI-intensive industries. Besides, post 2002, the female workers were found to have worked for shorter hours than male workers, which according to us, could be largely attributed to the enforcement of the GEEA.

An in-depth analysis of the labour market effects of gender equality legislation should be useful to policymakers, especially those interested in understanding the impact of legislative measures and policy reforms on labour market and employment outcomes across industry types. If enforcement of a gender equality legislation has succeeded in reducing the gender gap more in one set of industries than the others (e.g. foreign owned instead of domestic industries), as the authors noticed in this study, then the same should have a bearing on revamping of future enactment and enforcement too.

Current study findings would not only provide the broad lessons to the policymakers in Taiwan, but the results that have emerged from a country case study could be referred by other growing economies who are enthusiastic about improving female workers’ working conditions through legislative reforms.

The prevalence of domestic violence in Nigeria may be described as epidemic. To address this scourge, several pieces of legislation have been enacted in the past decade at state and federal levels in Nigeria. The purpose of this study is to evaluate the emerging legislation on domestic violence. This paper thus examines the contents of these laws in a bid to determine the potential of these laws to prevent domestic violence, deter perpetrators from further incidents, punish perpetrators, compensate survivors and provide them with the necessary interventions for their rehabilitation.

The approach adopted is a content analysis of the provisions of the legislation, using salient parameters that have been drawn from documented best practices, specifically the key components for framing of domestic violence legislation around the world.

The author finds that while there is significant attempt in extant legislation to ensure that women are protected within domestic relationships, there are still gaps. Further, the protections are uneven across the states. In addition, there are systemic and contextual challenges that hamper the effectiveness of existing legislation in Nigeria in providing the necessary protections to women.

This study analyses the provisions of some of the legislation currently in place to protect persons from domestic violence. The impact, potential effect and overall utility of these pieces of legislation continue to require examination.

The purpose of this paper is to create a strong connection among the gender diversity literature in the stream of gender quotas in the international context and the main legislation on gender diversity – the Law 120/2011 “Golfo-Mosca” – in Italy requiring listed companies and companies under the public control to implement policies for increasing board diversity.

This paper adopts a structured literature review method to propose relevant issues on this topic applying an innovative analytical framework based on the “article focus.” Additionally, an interview to a CEO of an Italian Bank has been done.

In this step, results seem to underline the prominence of literature analyzing “woman in board of directors” promoting board diversity in the light of good governance. Additionally, this analysis is functional to the proposition of interesting insights from the Golfo-Mosca Law’s analysis in Italy emphasizing primary effects of its application during past seven years.

Findings of this paper are original, as it is the first time that a research connects results from the structured literature review on gender issues and the related Italian law to draft emerging and thrilling issues in the light of transparent and responsible corporate governance system.

Understanding cultural differences is critical to international business success. Hofstede's (1980) model of national culture is widely used to identify such differences. The cultural dimensions identified in Hofstede's model, however, are not gender‐specific, with one exception, masculinity/femininity. Hofstede's data were gathered in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Considerable change has taken place since that time, particularly in the areas of education, legislation, and workforce composition. It is proposed that these changes, among others, may have resulted in gender differences in dimensions of national culture. This study provides an exploratory examination of gender differences in cultural characteristics in two industrialised countries with distinctly different cultures, Japan and the USA. Results indicate that gender differences exist in the power distance dimension for Japan and in the individualism/collectivism dimension for Japan and the USA. Theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed.

This paper aims to provide an exploratory analysis of male and female directors, comparing the case of UK FTSE 350 boards of directors for 2010–2018, with Norwegian boards from 2002 to 2018, to examine patterns of busy female directors. This paper considers the differences between the effects of interest groups’ actions and those of quotas on the emergence of busy female directors.

This paper uses a longitudinal approach, providing an examination of both non-busy directors and busy directors sitting on the boards of UK and Norwegian firms, with a focus on female directors. Drawing on methods from social network analysis, several trends and patterns are mapped for the two corporate systems. The paper tests whether the proportion of busy male directors is significantly different from the proportion of busy female directors in the two institutional settings.

The results show there has been an increase in the proportion of busy female directors, whereas the level of busy male directors is slightly decreasing in the UK from 2010 to 2018. In Norway, following the introduction of gender quotas on corporate boards, there has been an increase in overboarded directors, especially female directors, along with the rise of so-called “golden skirt” directors. However, when compared to the UK case, the proportion of busy male and female directors is higher, suggesting that the emergence of the golden skirts in Norway is not a result of quotas alone.

The topic of busy directors has received increased attention in recent years, yet the gender of these directors is often neglected. This paper provides an overview of the characteristics of busy female directors for large UK and Norwegian firms, presenting avenues for future research.

Public procurement, as well as constituting a means of providing goods and services, also represents a powerful legal instrument available to contracting authorities to ensure compliance with secondary or noncommercial goals. Among these secondary objectives, equality between women and men may be highlighted. The possibility of integrating social concerns into public procurement is envisaged in the Community Directives on public procurement and has also been incorporated in the legal systems of various Member States. This paper studies the inclusion of social clauses on gender equality that appear in the different phases of a procurement procedure in the Spanish Public Procurement Law (Law 30/2007, 30th October, on Public Sector Contracts).

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the role of women in the Georgia General Assembly and determines the impact of gender on the activities of state legislators, specifically in the areas of committee assignments and sponsored legislation from 2003 to 2014.

The approach set forth in this analysis seeks to answer four research questions employing quantitative data regarding female legislator involvement in activities of the state legislature and compare these findings with their male colleagues over a ten-year period.

Some of the key findings include that female representative sponsor fewer bills and participate in fewer committees than their male counterparts. The only legislative area female representatives exercise greater involvement is in government committees. The paper concludes with policy recommendations on how to address the current standing of women in the Georgia General Assembly.

A value of this analysis is that its content can support comparative work that can prove helpful to future research goals. As the most comprehensive analysis of its kind in Georgia, this paper contributes to a better understanding of the state legislature.

The relationship between gender and governance is often neglected in both conceptual and empirical work. However, gender equality in the decision-making fora is vital, for enabling far-reaching social change and for empowering people excluded from decision making. The purpose of this paper is to analyse the participation of women in governance institutions in a small island economy like Mauritius. Though, there has been some progress in Mauritius in redressing the gender imbalance in national and local governance processes, more is still to be achieved. This paper analyses women participation in governance by using gender-sensitive governance indicators.

Data were collected from different sources namely from the Mauritian Electoral Commissioner's Office, Statistics Mauritius, Mauritius Household Budget Surveys and the Ministry of Education and Human Resources. Data were also made available from the Global Gender Gap Report, 2012; the Global Parliamentary Report, 2012 and the SADC Gender Protocol Barometer, 2012. These data were used in the computation of gender-sensitive governance indicators used by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP, 2006). The indicators are the Global Gender Gap Index, the percentage of seats reserved in parliament for women, voter turnout among registered females and prevalence of women in poor districts.

The paper argues that the overall gender gap index for Mauritius has increased over the years but the scores for economic participation and political attainment remain very low. In the economic sphere, the author note a rising female unemployment rate, though girls perform better than boys at all educational levels. Mauritius has been adept at the politics of recognition of different ethnic groups but this approach has not addressed the issue of women. The findings reveal that women are often excluded from decision making, from the household up to the highest levels of policymaking. The “invisibility” of women in parliament, is a concern and is “a grave democratic deficit” for the country (Sachs, 2001).

No study has taken a gender perspective of governance issues in Mauritius. The author assess the importance of gender in a democratic country like Mauritius which has performed well on the economic front but gender is still too often ignored in governance and other spheres. There is thus a growing need for greater gender equality and participation of women in governance institutions and processes.

This paper aims to investigate the relationship between boardroom gender diversity and intellectual capital (IC) efficiency in China – while the previous literature focuses only on traditional accounting-based performance measures such as return on assets or Tobin’s Q.

A well-developed Arrelano–Bond generalised method of moment (GMM) is applied to account for endogeneity – mainly because of simultaneity and unobserved heterogeneity. Moreover, this study uses an adjusted-value added intellectual coefficient (VAIC) model to measure the IC efficiency of 906 Chinese listed firms for 2010-2014.

The empirical analysis shows a significant relationship between gender diversity and IC efficiency, in static ordinary least square estimation, but this disappears when endogeneity is accounted for using dynamic GMM. This insignificant relationship remains consistent, even when two alternative proxies of gender diversity, i.e. the Blau index and the women dummy, are used.

This study provides some useful insights into the traditional Chinese corporate structure where females cannot use their powers to bring corporate changes in firms. The findings show that gender-related stereotypical attitudes continue to exist in China. The regulators, therefore, should look into strengthening gender related regulations – which are currently non-existent in China.

This is the first study of its kind to investigate the relationship between gender diversity and IC efficiency in China using the A-VAIC model and GMM to mitigate endogeneity.