Mind the Gap: A Psychological and Structural Perspective on Activist Shareholders’ Targeting of Women CEOs
Bibliographic record
Abstract
An important challenge faced by women CEOs is that their firms tend to receive more shareholder activism than firms with men CEOs. Frequently, this activism represents attempts by shareholders to direct or override the decisions made by the firms’ leaders. The current paper integrates micro and macro perspectives to explore the factors influencing gender differences in shareholder activism. Drawing on social psychology research, we examine gender role expectations and perceived lack of fit as underlying psychological mechanisms, and we use industry gender type (i.e., men- or women-dominated industry) as an important structural factor that shapes the effects of these psychological mechanisms and women CEOs’ propensity to be targeted by shareholder activism. We test the hypotheses using archival data of shareholder activism at S&P 1500 companies. We also use two vignette-based experiments to examine the underlying mechanisms for why CEO gender relates to shareholder activism differently across industries. Implications and directions for future research are discussed.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
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 | 0.001 | 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".