A vicious cycle of symbolic tokenism: The gendered effects of external board memberships on chief executive officer compensation
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Integrating theoretical perspectives on tokenism and perceived preferential selection, we explore whether the relationship between chief executive officers' (CEOs') external board memberships and CEO compensation is gendered. Based on recent pressures to diversify corporate boards, we theorize that female CEOs' memberships on external boards will result in less monetary compensation relative to male CEOs due to concerns of organizational decision‐makers that female CEOs generally inhabit token or “symbolic” positions of limited value. Additionally, we present competing hypotheses (i.e., mitigation vs. exacerbation) regarding how this devaluation will be affected by female representation on the board of directors and compensation committee, respectively. Using a panel sample of 12,464 firm‐year observations comprising of 1,805 unique firms and 2,782 unique CEOs, the relationship between CEO external board memberships and compensation is indeed weaker for female compared to male CEOs. Furthermore, this devaluation primarily occurred in organizations where there was stronger (vs. weaker) female representation on the board of directors or compensation committee. However, supplemental analyses revealed that this differential devaluation was mitigated when female executives on the board held greater power (i.e., chaired important committees), highlighting the importance of moving beyond mere representation to ensuring influence on boards for female directors.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it