Abstract

Corporate elites have been male bastions until very recently and businesswomen have been very few and difficult to track. This paper addresses this topic by investigating the presence of women among the directors of the top 250 Italian joint-stock companies in eleven benchmark years spanning from 1913 to 2017. It shows a male preponderance throughout the period investigated. Women were nearly totally excluded from Italian boards until the end of the 20^th century and their number showed a sizeable increase only after the turn of the century. Women also occupied marginal positions in the boards: very few of them held multiple directorships and the first female interlocker appeared only in 1972. In a country dominated by family capitalism, for a long time the very few women directors sat on the boards of family firms and were members of the families that owned these firms. The presence of women in Italian corporate boards was boosted in recent years by the introduction in 2011 of mandatory gender quotas for listed firms and for firms participated by the state. This law provided legitimacy to the appointment of women on boards also in other firms not affected by the new regulation. The massive increase in seats held by women led to a professionalisation of female directors in Italy, even though women are still largely excluded from top executive positions.

摘要

直到最近，企业精英一直是男性的堡垒，而女企业家则很少且难以追踪。本文通过调查从 1913 年到 2017 年的 11 个基准年中，意大利 250 家顶级股份公司的董事中女性的存在来解决这个主题。它显示了在整个调查期间男性占优势。直到 20 世纪末，女性几乎完全被排除在意大利董事会^之外世纪之交，其数量仅在世纪之交后才显着增加。女性在董事会中也占据着边缘地位：她们中很少有人担任多个董事职位，而第一个女性联锁人直到 1972 年才出现。在一个由家庭资本主义主导的国家，长期以来，很少有女性董事担任家族企业的董事会成员并且是拥有这些公司的家族成员。近年来，由于 2011 年对上市公司和国家参与的公司实行强制性性别配额，意大利公司董事会中的女性人数有所增加。该法律为在不受新法规影响的其他公司任命女性担任董事会成员提供了合法性。女性席位的大量增加导致意大利女性导演的专业化，