Darren Rosenblum

More than a Woman: Insights into Corporate Governance after the French Sex Quota

In 2011, France enacted a Corporate Board Quota to establish a forty percent floor for either sex on corporate boards. Existing literature presumes that women will change the way firms function and that their presence in upper management will improve both governance and financial returns. To assess the potential impact of the quota, we interviewed twenty-four current and former corporate board members. Our analysis of these interviews generates two findings. First our results indicate that, at least in the view of board members, the sex quota has had an impact on the process of board decision making, but adding women has not affected the substance of decision-making. Second, our findings suggest for the first time that adding women to a board may well have a substantive impact on decision making, not because of the sex of newly added member but because they more likely to be outsiders. French participants reported that newly added female members affected substantive decision making because they were more likely to be foreign, to be expert in a wider range of areas, and to be drawn from non-elite networks than their male counterparts.

Feminizing Capital: A Corporate Imperative

The economic crisis has upended the divide between the public sector and the corporate world, as governments engage in mass intervention in the private sector. This crisis has exposed the need for new leadership in the corporate world. Gendered understandings of economic relations have surfaced – some argue that testosterone encourages excessive greed in boom cycles and fear in bust cycles, or that women can help clean up the mess. This Article explores capital’s Achilles heel – the exclusion of women from its leadership ranks – and one innovative remedy for this shortcoming. Despite a plethora of political representation quotas for women throughout the world, only Norway has instituted a quota to integrate women into corporate leadership. Passed in 2004, the Corporate Board Quota forces all publicly-listed companies to repopulate their boards to reflect a forty percent floor for either gender by the deadline of January 1, 2008, upon penalty of dissolution. This draconian penalty induced all covered corporations to comply. Norway’s dramatic intervention to feminize capital reflects a public/private symbiosis in which the public norm of gender equality infuses private efforts, even as private goals such as economic growth drive public policy. Relying on studies that showed the advantages of a broader pool of corporate leadership, Norway succeeded in transforming its corporate boards. Gender balance has increased and we await the results with regard to corporate performance. Such novel economically and socially optimal remedies for entrenched inequality support the rising purchase of a public/private symbiosis. Although U.S. jurisprudence eschews quotas, the economic crisis has begun to diminish free-market proponents’ fear of public intervention. The CBQ’s novel interaction between the public and private sectors heralds the beginning of a broader conversation about the relationship between effective corporate governance and gender.

Equality Regimes Compared: France's Political and Corporate Quotas

This article differentiates parity, the French political quota from the French Corporate Board Quota. Further, the article articulates how an examination of political quotas after the corporate board quota was passed could be beneficial in reexamining and reformatting political quotas. Both share the goal of increasing representation of women. The French political quota preceded the Corporate Board Quota and was relatively unsuccessful, which may have led to the difference in the implementation of the Corporate Board Quota. The paper concludes that the Corporate Board Quotas is both more modest and stronger than the political board quotas. More modest because the focus of the remedy is on the board and not the executive committee, which is a less powerful institution within the corporate governance structure. The Corporate Board Quota is stronger because they mandate seats and not merely candidacies. There are advantages to the focus within the corporate context of different sites of governance and different ways to affect governance which suggest other mechanisms for political equality regimes.