Dr. Morten Huse, who holds the Reinhard Mohn Endowed Chair for Corporate Governance, Business Ethics and Social Evolution at Witten/Herdecke University (UW/H), write in the Journal of Business Ethics about some of the issues surrounding women on boards as well as employee-elected board members. We focus on women in the following synopsis:

In recent years, there has been increasing pressure from society and investors to appoint women directors on corporate boards. The number of women in top management and board positions has slowly increased. How does gender diversity contribute to variations in board tasks. Some have argued that there are greater differences among men and women than there are between men and women.

Conventional wisdom suggests that men focus more on quantitative issues and that women are more concerned with qualitative issues. How the bottom line is affected by this difference is still debated. If women are more concerned with corporate governance and social issues, how does this impact shareholder value? Does the adding of women to boards increase diversity of thought in the boardroom? And if it does, increasing studies show that decision-making is improved.

Some recent studies have re-directed the questions about if women make contributions to how women make contributions. When women are in the boardroom, discussions appear to be more open and creative. Are they?

In showing the need to go beyond board composition and corporate financial performances Huse suggests 1. Going beyond demographic descriptions of women, 2. Exploring differences related to various boards takes to include open discussions in the boardroom as a mediating variable between board member characteristics and boardroom tasks.

1. Huse’s research results emphasize that backgrounds and experiences go beyond gender and external demographics and that the personalities of the individual board members should be considered when researching the implications of diversity.

2. While women are expected to have a more questioning attitude than men and contribute to more open discussions in the boardroom, Huse has found that the contribution of women to creative discussions only existed when the women had a different background from the men. However, this relationship was weak. A possible reason for the lack of strong findings may be that women directors tend to adopt the ideas of the conventional board members.

3. Other research has found that minority board members make a contribution to their boards dependent on (1) their own previous experience in a minority position of other corporate boards and (2) previous experience by other board members in a minority position. Hence, while women directors may bring alternative back- grounds and knowledge to the boardroom, they may lack the experience of how to actually present and bring through such knowledge.

4. There appears to be correlation between women board members and concerns of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR).

5. In the case of women directors, Huse found that esteem was positively related to budget controls, but not to the other types of control. However, the esteem of the women directors was generally found to be high and the lack of variations in the data might have caused the lack of findings.  Women on Boards