The Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu The leading online blog in the fields of corporate governance and financial regulation. Fri, 24 Jul 2026 11:32:21 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.5.8 https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/cropped-photography-4-e1706898544564-1-32x32.png Gender Quotas and Support for Women in Board Elections – The Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu 32 32 Gender Quotas and Support for Women in Board Elections https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2021/03/03/gender-quotas-and-support-for-women-in-board-elections/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=gender-quotas-and-support-for-women-in-board-elections https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2021/03/03/gender-quotas-and-support-for-women-in-board-elections/#comments Wed, 03 Mar 2021 13:49:16 +0000 https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/?p=136599?d=20210309162602EST Posted by Marina Gertsberg (Monash University), Johanna Mollerstrom (George Mason University), and Michaela Pagel (Columbia), on Wednesday, March 3, 2021
Editor's Note:

Marina Gertsberg is Assistant Professor of Finance at Monash University; Johanna Mollerstrom is Associate Professor of Economics at George Mason University; and Michaela Pagel is Associate Professor of Finance at Columbia Business School. This post is based on their recent paper. Related research from the Program on Corporate Governance includes Politics and Gender in the Executive Suite by Alma Cohen, Moshe Hazan, and David Weiss (discussed on the Forum here).

In September 2018 a quota for corporate boards was passed in California (CA Senate Bill 826). It requires all publicly held firms headquartered in the state to have at least one appointed female director by the end of 2019, and two (three) female board members by the end of 2021 for boards with five (six or more) members. Following the lead of several European countries, this made California the first US state to impose a binding gender quota on boards. The stock market reacted negatively to the quota (as documented by Hwang, Shivdasani, and Simintzi, 2018; Greene, Intintoli, and Kahle, 2020), a fact which has been interpreted as evidence that shareholders oppose the mandated addition of new female directors (e.g., because of scarcity of qualified female candidates leading to higher search costs, or to suboptimal trustees being appointed, see also Ahern and Dittmar, 2012) and prefer the current composition of the board.

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