Family-owned firms resist board diversity gains despite gender quotas, study finds

Quotas are helping to place more women on powerful board committees across Europe, but new research from emlyon business school shows that family-owned firms remain resistant, leaving leadership diversity lagging despite regulatory pressure

Family-owned companies are less likely to appoint women to influential board committees, even when national gender quotas are in place, according to new research.

The study of 3,500 publicly listed firms across 25 countries found that quotas generally increased the presence of women on major board committees (MBCs), challenging existing power structures and moving beyond token representation at board level.

But the analysis showed that the effect of quotas varied significantly depending on ownership. State-owned firms and companies with large institutional investors were far more likely to appoint women to key committees, while family-controlled firms often reduced female representation, reflecting what researchers described as a tendency towards more conservative governance practices.

Overall, the data underlined the continued imbalance at the top of corporate leadership. Less than two per cent of chief executives in the sample were women, while only 1.75 per cent of firms had a female chair. Almost half of companies had no women at all on any major board committee.

The research, published in the Journal of Management Studies, concludes that gender quotas, when combined with supportive ownership structures, can materially improve women’s access to positions of influence, but that entrenched governance models in family-owned firms continue to hold back diversity.

Professor Jean-Luc Arregle, Professor of International Strategy at emlyon business school, which conducted the study, said: “These findings alleviate our concerns that quota passing would result in tokenism – the practice of making superficial or symbolic effort, without addressing the problem – where firms would appoint women to BOD but would refuse to grant them influential positions such as MBC membership.”

He added: “It is important to highlight that in our data sample, women are underrepresented in all key corporate leadership positions. Only 1.36 per cent of CEOs are women, and only 1.75 per cent have a female board chair. In 49 per cent of the companies, there was not a woman on a major board committee.”

READ MORE: Study links female-dominated classrooms to higher lifetime earnings for women. Research by Durham University Business School and the University of Basel suggests that girls surrounded by more female peers at school are more likely to enter better-paid careers and narrow the gender pay gap.

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