GENDER DIVERSITY ON CORPORATE BOARDS -- STILL A DISTANT DREAM?

The paper discusses gender diversity on corporate boards in several developed countries in North America, Europe, and Asia. Despite women's wider access to higher education and participation in the workforce, their promotion to leadership roles is often deterred by powerful cultural, corporate and legislative barriers, which relegate women to specific realms of activity, inhibiting their career aspirations and ambitions to climb the corporate ladder. We analyzed extant literature regarding measures to achieve board gender diversity and concluded that, although mandating quotas is a successful legislative measure to enhance board diversity in some countries, others prefer to adopt measures which better suit their specific cultural and political environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]