Modern organizations face increasing pressure to ensure that women are well represented in their workforce, especially in senior management. Business leaders, stakeholders, and policymakers around the world are focusing their attention on having more diverse leadership at the top and eliminating the “glass ceiling” that holds women back (e.g., Eddleston & Sabil, 2019; Kirsch, 2018; Knippen et al., 2019; Woehler et al., 2021).
Traditionally, women are presented as highly socially sensitive and more benevolent, caring, friendly, sympathetic, and trustworthy; therefore, concerned about the well-being of others (e.g., Eagly, 1987; Eagly and Karau, 2002). One would expect that a greater number of women on boards of directors would translate into fewer practices that negatively affect employee well-being and, therefore, job stress (e.g., job insecurity). However, this is not always the case. Specifically, women in senior positions who strive to avoid being marginalized may be induced to behave in a more “agentic” manner (i.e., assertive, ambitious, striving for personal gain; Eagly, 1987; Tang et al., 2021) than women in other positions. We suspected that this was more likely to occur in non-family businesses, as female directors may feel pressured to support difficult decisions that could help the company’s financial results at the expense of employees.
After studying 1,014 publicly traded U.S. companies between 2007 and 2017, we concluded that family businesses with women on their boards of directors offered greater job security (fewer workforce reductions). As Gómez-Mejía et al. (2023) point out, job insecurity would lead to the loss of emotional attachment of family owners, so the presence of women on the board should help prevent that loss. In addition, we found that this is especially true when the women members of the board are part of the owning family.
