Mandatory Quotas for Women on Boards of Directors in the European Union: Harmful to or Good for Company Performance?

Authors

Monika Leszczynska, Texas A&M University School of LawFollow

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2018

Journal Title

European Business Organization Law Review

ISSN

1741-6205

DOI

10.1007/s40804-017-0095-x

Abstract

Impact assessments are an important component of a better regulation programme—an initiative of the European Commission launched to improve the quality and transparency of the EU (European Union) law-making process. In the current article, I take a closer look at the Impact Assessment (IA) issued by the European Commission together with a Directive proposing a 40% obligatory female representation on the boards of directors in European public companies. In the IA, the Commission defined an improvement of corporate governance as one of the objectives to be achieved by the Directive. The Commission claimed that the more gender-diverse a corporate board is, the better it will perform. However, it is questionable whether mandatory quotas indeed have such a positive impact on corporate governance. Here I argue that, to properly assess the impact of a given policy, it is crucial to examine how the policy measure itself interferes with corporate performance. I present both field and laboratory studies investigating the influence of mandatory quotas on company performance, individual attitudes and group cooperation. Next, I discuss implications of these findings for the evaluation of the IA quality as well as the legality of the Directive. The current analysis of the IA shows that despite recent improvements there are still considerable flaws in conducting impact assessments of the EU legal initiatives.

First Page

35

Last Page

61

Num Pages

27

Volume Number

19

Issue Number

1

Publisher

Asser Press

Recommended Citation

Monika Leszczynska, Mandatory Quotas for Women on Boards of Directors in the European Union: Harmful to or Good for Company Performance?, 19 Eur. Bus. Org. L. Rev. 35 (2018).
Available at: https://scholarship.law.tamu.edu/facscholar/2109

File Type

PDF