Gender board diversity across Europe throughout four decades

TL;DR

This paper introduces a dataset tracking women's representation on corporate boards across 43 European countries from 1985 to 2020.

Contribution

The paper introduces a new dataset and a novel measure for gender board diversity across European countries over four decades.

Findings

The dataset includes over 28 million firms and 59 million board members across 43 European countries.

It provides three distinct measures of gender board diversity at the industry, country, and year levels.

A new measure tracks the share of firms with no women on their boards.

Abstract

We present a Gender Board Diversity Dataset (GBDD), which provides a cross-country perspective on women in management and supervisory boards that spans between 1985 and 2020. The data covers 43 European countries and accounts for private companies in addition to the stock-listed ones. GBBD was created using firm-level Orbis data. Our measures are based on a sample of more than 28 million unique firms observed for nearly seven years on average and reporting data about nearly 59 million individuals on management and supervisory boards. We provide the measures at the level of industry, country and year (firm-level data is proprietary). We provide three measures. The first is the share of women among all board members in a given industry, country, and year. The second one is the average of the shares of women across firms in a given industry, country and year. We also provide a new measure: the share of firms in a given industry, country and year which report no single woman on their board(s).

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