Resisting Equality: An analysis of corporate elite’s defensive institutional work against gender board quota

Abstract

This paper investigates the defensive institutional work of corporate elites against the legal gender quota deinstitutionalizing male-dominated corporate board rooms. To gain insight into this resistance, we draw on Maguire and Hardy’s (2009) discursive approach to defensive institutional work to analyze in-depth interviews with 40 female and male corporate board directors of publicly listed companies in Belgium, a country which recently introduced a 1/3- 2/3 gender quota. Corporate elite resists the deinstitutionalization of male-dominated boards by combining discursive practices that defend the legitimacy of male-dominated board rooms, reject quotas and envision more gender equal futures of gender equality. These practices draw on the three key discourses of trust, meritocracy, and freedom to construct women as unfit and inadequate for boards and the speaker as the custodian of the board as a community of trust, selected through merit and protecting the capitalistic enterprise. The paper contributes to the neo-institutional literature by showing the key role of prosocial claims and identity work in defensive institutional work. It contributes to the literature on women on corporate boards by accounting for corporate resistance to gender quotas as an expression of freedom of enterprise and economic liberty.