Homecoming of our work on board diversity
Our work in the EARHART project was in collaboration with the crew of NHH. As luck would have it, this year's annual meeting of the European Association of Labor Economics was hosted by ... NHH. We were very happy to come back and present one of our papers, discussing the implications of gender board diversity for the (adjusted) gender wage gap in the European economies. We had many wonderful conversations, especially with Emma von Essen, who does research on exactly the same topic!
We address the gender wage gap in Europe, focusing on the impact of female representation in executive and non-executive boards. We use a novel dataset to identify gender board diversity across European firms, which covers a comprehensive sample of private firms in addition to publicly listed ones. Our study spans three waves of the Structure of Earnings Survey, covering 26 countries and multiple industries. Despite low prevalence of female representation and the complex nature of gender wage inequality, our findings reveal a robust causal link: increased gender diversity significantly decreases the adjusted gender wage gap. We also demonstrate that to meaningfully impact gender wage gaps, the presence of a single female representative in leadership is insufficient.