What distinguishes women nonexecutive directors from executive directors?: individual, interpersonal, and organizational factors related to women's appointment to boards
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Little is known about the factors that help women become company directors, with few research studies done. Studies from the United States (Catalyst, 1995a, 1995b), Britain (Holton, 1995a, 1995b, 1995c), Canada (Burke, 1995; Burke & Kurucz, 1998; Mitchell, 1984), and Australia (Rom/Ferry International, 1997) offer extensive and useful descriptions of women directors from frequencies of demographic, experiential, and organizational characteristics. However, the relative importance of factors is not assessed for appointment to boards, nor the importance of other factors, such as social processes. The aim of this study is to add to our understanding of women's appointments to boards by assessing the relative importance of a broader range of factors than previously examined, using an Australian sample. Women company directors in Australia hold only 4% of board positions (Korn/Ferry International, 1996, 1997). Boards of governance of Australian companies usually consist of a mixture of outsider directors, called nonexecutive directors, and a small number of senior executive staff from within the company itself, called executive directors (Korn/Ferry International, 1995). This study assesses the factors linked to women attaining nonexecutive as opposed to executive board status. Women nonexecutive directors are more freely selected (invited, elected) than women executive directors who are on the board often because they work for the company or are owners. Because there are so few top executive women, the choice of women executive directors in an individual company is limited to very few women, perhaps one or two. This comparison therefore provides an avenue for assessing the factors that help women to be freely chosen for boards (i.e., nonexecutive directors) rather than being on boards because they work for, or own, the company (i.e., executive directors). Hence, the aim of this study is to extend understanding of how women are appointed to boards in Australia by identifying distinguishing individual characteristics and situational factors with regard to nonexecutive compared to executive status. Studies of the correlates of women directors' board representation (Burke, 1995; Mattis, 1997; McGregor, 1997) have rarely examined situational factors or evaluated the relative importance of individual and situational factors (there are exceptions, Bilimoria & Piderit, 1994). The situational factors examined comprise both interpersonal and organizational factors.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".