No Seat at the Table: How Corporate Governance and Law Keep Women Out of the Boardroom » (New Edition)

Douglas M. Branson is W. Edward Sell Chair in Business Law at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law. His publications include Questions and Answers: Business Associations Understanding Corporate Law and Corporate Governance.

Women are completing MBA and Law degrees in record high numbers, but their struggle to attain director positions in corporate America continues. Although explanations for this disconnect abound, neither career counselors nor scholars have paid enough attention to the role that corporate governance plays in maintaining the gender gap in America's executive quarters.

Mining corporate governance models applied at Fortune 500 companies, hundreds of Title VII discrimination cases, and proxy statements, Douglas M. Branson suggests that women have been ill-advised by experts, who tend to teach females how to act like their male, executive counterparts. Instead, women who aspire to the boardroom should focus on the decision-making processes nominating committees—usually dominated by white men—employ when voting on membership.

Filled with real-life cases, No Seat at the Table opens the closed doors of the boardroom and reveals the dynamics of the corporate governance process and the double standards that often characterize it. Based on empirical evidence, Branson concludes that women have to follow different paths than men in order to gain CEO status, and as such, encourages women to make flexible, conscious, and often frequent shifts in their professional behaviors and work ethics as they climb the corporate ladder.

Acknowledgments     ix
Introduction     1
Glass Ceilings, Floors, and Walls     7
Restraints on Advancement     9
Glass Ceilings and Floors: The Court Cases     21
Prices of Motherhood: Stereotyping, Work/Life Issues, and Opting Out     35
In a Different Register: Women in the Governance Model     55
Bully Broads, Iron Maidens, Queen Bees, and Ice Queens     65
Climbing the Corporate Ladder: Myths and Realities     75
Routes to the Top: The Advice     77
The Road to the Top: The Evidence     87
The 2005 Proxy Data     97
Women and Minorities in Organizations: The Legacy of Tokenism     109
Corporate Governance and the Keeper of the Keys to the Boardroom     125
Corporate Governance in America     127
Women, Culture, and the U.S. Model of Corporate Governance     134
Women in Corporate Governance: The Numbers versus the Expectations     143
Getting a Seat at the Boardroom Table     159
Paradigm Shifts: A Tale of Three Women     161
Prescriptions     176
Fortune 500 Corporations with No Women Directors     187
Fortune 500 Corporations with a Single Woman Director     189
Notes     193
Bibliography     225
Index     233
About the Author     239