Although we can observe noticeable progress in gender diversity on
corporate boards, these boards remain far from gender balanced. Our
paper builds on social identity theory to examine the impact of
corporate elites—men and women who sit on multiple corporate boards—on
board diversity. We extend the main argument of social identity theory
concerning favouritism based on homophily by suggesting that boards with
men with multiple appointments are unwilling to include female board
members to protect the monopoly value generated by their elite status.
The empirical analysis, based on DAX 30 firms in the period of
2010–2015, shows that the presence of multi-board men is negatively
associated with women’s participation, while the presence of multi-board
women and other women on management boards is positively related to
gender diversity on boards. Furthermore, robustness tests support and
confirm our conclusion that multi-board men have a significant
association with board diversity, even with small size (i.e. 1 or 2).
Additionally, we find a significant effect arising from pressure related
to the introduction of gender quotas in Germany, effective in 2016,
indicating the effectiveness of gender quota policies for board gender
diversity.