Women may be climbing on board, but not in first class: a long-term and comparative study on female board participation in Argentina and Chile (1923-2010),

LLUCH ANDREA; SALVAJ ERICA

Boston

Congreso; WEHC 2018; 2018

IEHA

Businesswomen have been largely invisible and difficult to track in history. In the topic of corporate power and gender relations, recent studies have emphasized that corporate elites have until very recently been all-male bastions (Heemskerk and Fennema 2014). In particular, the issue of female board participation remains contested and research on this topic has increased recently (Nadkarni and Oon, 2015), mainly associated with policies seeking a more gender diversity on corporate boards. In the last years, several researches have discussed different policies to make boards more gender balanced. However, few analyses have tried to trace back the female board participation, the process and the causes of a possible increase in the feminization of corporate elites in emerging economies during the last century. In this paper, we seek to examine what are the factors that led to increase gender diversity in boards. To address this issue, we explore processes and factors that enabled women´ incorporation in the corporate elite in Argentina and Chile from a long-term perspective. We restrict our attention to the entry of women onto the corporate boards of the 100 largest non-financial and 25 financial companies for both countries during the 20th century and the first decade of the current century. This approach represents a novelty since there have been no previous studies examining this issue in different settings outside the U.S. and Europe.