Women on German management boards

Oehmichen, Jana; Rapp, Marc Steffen; Wolff, Michael A.

doi:10.1007/978-3-8349-3869-5_6

Women on German management boards

Journal

Managing Diversity in Organizations

Date Issued

2012

Author(s)

Oehmichen, Jana

Rapp, Marc Steffen

Wolff, Michael A.

Editor(s)

Beham, Barbara

Straub, Caroline

Schwalbach, Joachim

DOI

10.1007/978-3-8349-3869-5_6

10.1007/s11573-011-0541-0

Abstract

In this paper we want to investigate the impact of company owners on the low percentage of women on management boards and whether they are attempting to increase this percentage. After analysing whether ownership concentration influences the number ofwomen on management boards we distinguish between different types of owners.We find that ownership concentration has no effect on the presence of women on German management boards, we show however that institutional and individual owners have a significantly positive effect. Classifying institutional owners into national and foreign owners illustrates that foreign investors are the primary driver of the positive effect within the class of institutional owners; the presence of national investors that are strongly influenced by the national banking system does not show any effect. Our analyses are based on 15,976 management board member positions from 2000 to 2007 in approximately 600 German-listed companies.