The enduring lack of diversity in the corporate elite continues to attract attention from scholars and practitioners. However, the issue of representation or ‘body count’ – in particular for women – tends to dominate the discussion and overshadows social-relational dimensions. Adopting a network perspective, this article investigates how gender and nationality interact with human and social capital (i.e. director capital), explaining why particular directors hold more influential positions in the corporate elite. Findings from Swiss data show that some specific aspects of human and social capital matter more than others for being an influential director and that, ceteris paribus, Swiss citizens benefit most from both sources of capital. The discussion engages with the implications of our findings on current approaches intended to increase the numbers of appointments of ‘diverse’ directors, and how these are expected to change the corporate elite and the related job market in the longer term.

企业精英长期缺乏多样性继续引起学者和从业者的关注。然而，代表性或“人数统计”的问题——尤其是对女性而言——往往会主导讨论并掩盖社会关系维度。本文采用网络视角，研究性别和国籍如何与人力和社会资本（即董事资本）相互作用，解释为什么特定董事在企业精英中占据更重要的地位。瑞士数据的调查结果表明，人力和社会资本的某些特定方面对于成为有影响力的导演来说比其他方面更重要，并且在其他条件不变的情况下, 瑞士公民从这两种资本来源中获益最多。讨论涉及我们的研究结果对当前旨在增加“多元化”董事任命数量的方法的影响，以及这些方法将如何在长期内改变企业精英和相关的就业市场。