Women as an (Un)Tapped Resource for Italy's Corporate Boards, 1983-2017

Abstract

Corporate boards have been male bastions until very recently, and women have been very few and difficult to track. In Italy, this has given rise to growing debates that have eventually led to the introduction of mandatory gender quotas for listed and state-participated (L&SP) firms under public control in 2011. In this chapter, the authors address this topic by investigating the presence of women among the directors of the top 250 Italian joint-stock companies from 1983 to 2017. In 1983, women were still nearly absent from Italian corporate boards. Their number showed a sizeable increase only in the 21st century, especially after the introduction of mandatory gender quotas. Quotas not only increased female presence on boards of L&SP firms, but also triggered an indirect “contagion effect”, that is, a higher proportion of women on boards of non-L&SP firms, even if the latter were not required to comply with this regulation. The massive increase in seats held by women led to a professionalization of female directors in Italy, even though women are still largely excluded from top executive positions.