Modern organizations face increasing pressure to make sure women are well represented in their workforce, especially at the top. Business leaders, stakeholders, and policymakers around the world are turning their attention to having more diverse leadership at the top and eliminating the “glass ceiling” that holds women down (e.g., Eddleston & Sabil, 2019; Kirsch, 2018; Knippen et al., 2019; Woehler et al., 2021).

Traditionally, women are portrayed as highly socially sensitive and more benevolent, caring, friendly, sympathetic, and trustworthy; thus, concerned with the well-being of others (e.g., Eagly, 1987; Eagly & Karau, 2002). One would expect that having more women on boards would mean fewer practices that negatively affect employee well-being and, thus work-related stress (for instance, job insecurity). However, this isn’t always the case. In particular, women in top posts striving to avoid becoming marginalized may be induced to behave more “agentically” (i.e., assertive, ambitious, striving for personal gain; Eagly, 1987; Tang et al., 2021) than women in other positions. We suspected that this might be more likely to occur in nonfamily firms, as women directors may feel pressure to support difficult decisions that could help the firm´s financial bottom line at the expense of employees.

After studying 1,014 publicly listed US firms from 2007 through 2017, we have concluded that family-run firms with women on their boards provided better employment security (fewer workforce reductions). As pointed out by Gomez-Mejia et al. (2023), employment insecurity would result in the loss of emotional attachment for family owners, and thus women on the board should help prevent that loss. Additionally, we found that this is especially true when the women board members are part of the owning family.