The revolving door in the boardroom – Why men beget men

Observing gender diversity progress at top executive levels and in the Fortune 1000 boardroom is like watching an uncommitted jogger – we’re moving in the right direction, but where’s the pace?

INSEAD’s Van Der Hyden commented that reaching “historic highs” of 4.8% female Fortune 500 CEOs isn’t exactly impressive as it’s touted: “A more accurate statement is that when one starts at (or near) zero any positive change is (almost) infinite progress.”

In a recent article, Van Der Hyden points out that “the barriers (behaviors, labels, biases…) that prohibit the progression of women to the top are deep-rooted, pernicious, and ubiquitous… and much more prevalent than we imagine and recognise.”

These include serious pay disparities on top jobs, traditional-values skewed decision making, limiting perceptions around career path, women being mentored more but sponsored less than men, for a few.

Our founder and CEO Nicki Gilmour summed up 2014 boardroom figures as “Groundhog Day”: 17.7% of board positions are held by women in the Fortune 1000, a gain of 90 board seats during 2014. The US trails Europe in female board representation in S&P companies.

A recent study shows that the reason we may feel like we’re running in circles is that the boardroom has a revolving door.

“Running in Place”

A recent study entitled “Progress on gender diversity for corporate boards: Are we running in place?” analysed field data from more than 3000 companies across 9 years and found that voluntary gender equality efforts are hampered by a tendency towards gender matching – the tendency to pick a female board member when a female board member leaves and a male board member when a male board member leaves.

This is an obvious equation for perpetuating the status quo that the researchers point out could seriously undermine voluntary goals to build gender equality over time.

“The predominance of male directors results in a self-perpetuating outcome,” the researchers wrote. “The more women on the board, the better the chance they will further increase their representation, but these estimates suggest that it is a slow process, and not a gender-neutral one.”

The researchers conducted laboratory studies to understand the field evidence, and it revealed that the gender matching dynamic operates underneath stated and articulated thought processes. Participants judge gender as an insignificant factor when directly asked about it and give different reasons for their selections. “Yet, when controlling for these other reasons,” the researchers reported, “the gender of the departing candidate still plays a powerful role of determining the gender of the candidate selected.”

The researchers also found that talking about the importance of diversity did not increase the chances a woman candidate would be selected to replace a departing male executive. What did help was increasing the ratio of women in the candidate pool, but still a strong gender-matching effect remained.

In other words, banging the diversity drum doesn’t change boardroom composition towards greater gender equality.

Changing boardroom composition does.

The researchers report, “Our results suggest that the glacial pace at which women’s participation on boards is increasing may stem from a sub-conscious heuristic that guides people’s decisions towards using the gender of the departing director as a cue to the appropriate choice of a replacement…valuing diversity may not be sufficient to increase boardroom gender diversity.”

Getting Real about Results

Quotas, which can attract highly qualified applicants, are incredibly controversial but a more restrictive word for women is status quo. We can talk our way around diversity all day, and still not hit on the unconscious and ingrained dynamics that are at play even after everybody walks away from the table nodding their head, and indeed, while at it.

Researchers struggle to see how gender equality will show any real progression at a voluntary rate without public targets. Legislation and mandatory quotas are not generally favored in the USA environment. However, some non-quota initiatives recommended to improve boardroom diversity include “short-term goal setting, targeting, and disclosure, and a long-term focus on increasing the pipeline of qualified female board candidates.”

While women-led campaigns can push for results, getting more highly qualified at executive levels and in the boardroom comes down to companies delivering by taking up those initiatives with commitment, which poses a question.

What else are corporations truly committed to achieving that they do not set tangible, measurable, and reported targets for? And if they don’t set targets, are they committed?

By Aimee Hansen