Symbolic Management in Emerging Markets: The Case of Board Diversity

Governments around the world have prioritized efforts to promote gender equity in the workplace, including at the very apex of the organization - the board. One tool that has been increasingly used by policymakers are gender quotas in boards. We examine how a governance practice, originally enacted in Norway, was adopted in 2013 in the emerging market country of India. This emerging market context allows us to turn our institutional lens to gender (and human capital) rebalancing efforts on the board, and to shed light on systemic gender bias. We investigate the most critical issue associated with these quotas - do they produce substantive change or is change merely symbolic? To do so, we investigate which women were appointed through such quotas and how they contributed to governance in these formerly all-male boards. In doing so, we divert the conversation on symbolic management towards a new institutional context, where buffering processes and decoupling efforts are little understood. We close by proposing solutions to the underlying gender bias which is so ingrained in most emerging markets. In the process, we divert the attention of the gender quotas literature from its focus on performance, to more fundamental questions critical to change makers