From the Boardroom to the Jobsite: Female Board Representation and Workplace Safety

This study explored the effects that female board representation (FBR) on workplace safety.

Note: ‘safety’ in this study is based on reported incidents. So consider that caveat.

Data included 266 firms and 1,442 firm-year observations.

Background:

· “having female directors on corporate boards can influence a firm’s financial performance (Post and Byron 2015), social responsibility (Endrikat et al. 2021), and operations including plant closures (Tate and Yang 2015), product quality (Korenkiewicz and Maennig 2023), and recall decisions”

· “Given that women are more likely to show awareness and consideration of the needs of others .. combined with their tendency to display more care orientation— including a desire not to harm in their decision-making .. we reason that, compared to all-male boards, boards with female directors place greater emphasis on workplace safety because doing so helps minimize harm to internal stakeholders”

· “when women join teams, their presence evokes more sensitive behaviors from others, resulting in mixed- gender teams being more interpersonally compassionate and caring than teams that lack female representation”

· “This greater consideration and care for employee well-being that female directors bring to the board may help firms avoid prioritizing efficiency at all costs, a critical determinant of unsafe work behaviors”

Results

They found that:

· “female board representation improves workplace safety when women have more power and when boards face greater accountability pressures”

· Hence, FBR doesn’t of itself increase workplace safety incidents but “rather, increases in FBR enhance workplace safety in firms where female directors have more power and in firms where boards face greater accountability pressures”

· “Additionally, FBR increases workplace safety in firms with more MBR”

· “our finding that the main effect of FBR is not statistically significant suggests that, on average, the potential for FBR to improve workplace safety may be muted by a lack of cohesion, distrust, and social categorization processes”

They argue that the pressure that organisations/boards face to increasingly hire more females is driven by legitimacy logics, e.g. to be seen to be making a change or being compelled by regulations.

As such, “Female directors appointed to boards for legitimacy purposes often fail to gain influence on the board, as they are not incorporated into the boards’ inner workings”. Therefore, the lack of a statistically significant effect of FBR on safety incidents “corroborates the notion that merely adding female directors to boards does not mean they have equal influence as their peers do on board deliberations and decision-making”.

This also corroborates team diversity research, which they say “fails to show a reliable main effect of diversity on team performance”. Therefore, it is the context which is important with diversity and FBR. E.g. making the appropriate changes for the ‘right’ reasons rather than for legitimacy.

Nevertheless, their findings “provide evidence about the value that gender and racial/ethnic diversity can bring to organizations and encourage firms not just to appoint (more) women and racial/ethnic minorities to their board of directors, but also to give them positions on important board committees”.

Ref: Son, Y., Wowak, K. D., & Post, C. (2025). From the Boardroom to the Jobsite: Female Board Representation and Workplace Safety. Journal of Operations Management.