AN INSTITUTIONAL PERSPECTIVE OF WOMEN ON BOARDS IN LEBANON: PATHWAYS AND STRATEGIES TO MAINTAIN LEGITMACY

Abstract

Over the past decade, corporate boards have witnessed accelerated global demands to increase the diversity of their members, focusing on the inclusion of more women (Oldford et al., 2021). The inadequate number of women on boards has motivated legislators and policy makers around the world to implement gender quotas that require corporate boards to have a certain percentage of women members to avoid sanctions (Alessandra & Morten, 2021). This research project attempts to shed light on the pathways women take to make it on boards and examines their experiences once on boards, strategies adopted to maintain legitimacy, and legitimacy judgements towards their participation on boards by their male counterparts. Moving away from a focus on the link between board diversity and organizational performance, this project focuses instead on how and why women are appointed to boards, who are the women being appointed, what are some of the perceived multi-level challenges to serving on boards, what strategies do they adopt to maintain legitimacy on boards, and how they are perceived by their male counterparts. To do this, we adopt an institutional theory perspective (DiMaggio and Powell, 1983; Scott, 2008) and leverage the literature on legitimacy (Suchman, 1995; Suddaby & Greenwood 2005, Tost, 2011 & Bitektine, 2011) and go beyond the organizational level alone to better incorporate societal and institutional level considerations. We also bring novel insights from an understudied context, Lebanon, opening the conversation about women and corporate boards to richer and more internationally relevant insights and contributions.