Beyond the Glass Ceiling: Does Gender Matter?

By Renée B. Adams, Patricia Funk. Management Sciences, 2012

1,438 citations recorded by the source corpus.

A large literature documents that women are different from men in their choices and preferences, but little is known about gender differences in the boardroom. If women must be like men to break the glass ceiling, we might expect gender differences to disappear among directors. Using a large survey of directors, we show that female and male directors differ systematically in their core values and risk attitudes, but in ways that differ from gender differences in the general population. These results are robust to controlling for differences in observable characteristics. Consistent with findings for the population, female directors are more benevolent and universally concerned but less power oriented than male directors. However, in contrast to findings for the population, they are less tradition and security oriented than their male counterparts. They are also more risk loving than male directors. Thus, having a woman on the board need not lead to more risk-averse decision making. This paper was accepted by Brad Barber, Teck Ho, and Terrance Odean, special issue editors.

Subfields: Accounting, Gender Studies, Safety Research

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c30fb97a0436753a23a4c17def4f7477994becfe

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Accounting

1. M. Atif
2. Yiwei Li
3. Yeqin Zeng
4. C. Mallin
5. H. Farag
6. M. Malik
7. Benjamin Liu
8. Allen H. Huang

In Gender Studies

1. M. Atif
2. Yiwei Li
3. Yeqin Zeng
4. Benjamin Liu
5. Allen H. Huang
6. C. Mallin
7. H. Farag
8. Woon Sau Leung

In Safety Research

1. Yiwei Li
2. Yeqin Zeng
3. C. Mallin
4. H. Farag
5. M. Atif
6. Allen H. Huang
7. Woon Sau Leung
8. Jie Chen

Citations in the corpus

• Married CEOs and corporate social responsibility (2019, neutral): “Gender plays a critically important role because women exhibit more prosocial preferences compared to men (e.g., Beutel and Marini, 1995; Adams and Funk, 2012), and men”
• Women and Leadership (2017, background): “In a related thread of work, Adams and Funk (2012) did find that women directors are more benevolent and universally concerned than male directors, in line with democratic or participative tendencies.”
• Female board representation, corporate innovation and firm performance (2018, positive): “However, Adams and Funk (2012) and Adams and Ragunathan (2015) argue that gender differences in the general population may differ from those in the boardroom because of self-selection (women at the top of the corporate ladder may be quite different from those in the general population) or adaptive b”
• A Female Style in Corporate Leadership? Evidence from Quotas (2013, neutral): “To better understand gender differences among corporate leaders, Adams and Funk (2012) surveyed the universe of resident directors and CEOs of publicly traded companies in Sweden in 2005.28 Gender equality and board structure in Sweden are similar to Norway.”
• CEO Gender, Corporate Risk-Taking, and the Efficiency of Capital Allocation (2016, background): “(2015) provide survey-based evidence that Italian female managers are on average less risk tolerant than their male peers, Adams and Funk (2012) find Swedish female directors to be on average less risk-averse than male directors.”
• Does Boardroom Gender Diversity Matter? Evidence from a Transitional Economy (2015, background): “In fact, there is a small but developing literature documenting that female board representation matters for firm outcomes (Adams & Funk, 2012).”