The glass ceiling has proven hard to crack. Despite decades of concerted efforts to increase female representation at the executive level, women still hold less than 30 percent of C-suite positions in the United States. 

Starting with Norway in 2005, several European countries responded to their own corporate leadership gap by passing laws establishing minimum gender quotas for company boards. The hope was for a positive trickle-down effect, where female board members could boost women’s careers at both senior and lower levels through hiring decisions and corporate policies. 

Yet despite early evidence for this phenomenon, researchers David Matsa and Amalia Miller recently found that the European quota laws haven’t had their desired effect. 

“We found that when a U.S. board became more diverse, it was more likely to add a woman to the executive team,” says Matsa, Alan E. Peterson Distinguished Professor of Finance at Kellogg. “But when European countries have enacted board quotas, spillovers into executives haven’t followed.” 

Read more at: https://insight.kellogg.northwestern.edu/article/even-with-gender-quotas-the-glass-ceiling-hasnt-shattered