We have been talking about equality and inclusion—whether that be in terms of disability, ethnicity or gender—for decades, yet progress at the highest levels of business still remains slow.

Now, in almost any large company, the lower levels of management are far more gender diverse than they once were, but as you move upward, the numbers begin to dwindle drastically. It is as if the air thins with altitude, in the sense that the higher you climb, the fewer women you encounter.

This is not for lack of effort.

Initiatives such as the FTSE Women Leaders Review in the UK and the global 30% Club have pushed for greater female representation in senior roles, setting ambitious voluntary targets and encouraging accountability from business leaders.

A numbers game?

However, much of the previous work and initiatives on gender diversity in management, such as voluntary targets or overall board quotas, have simply focused on increasing the number of women on boards of directors as a whole. These efforts often stop at the headline level, without specifying where within the board those women will sit, and how much influence they actually have.

Moreover, in recent years, there have been significant concerns raised regarding these initiatives, with much discussion centering around the dangers of tokenism in the workplace. These concerns are valid. Many firms can reap the rewards from superficial, symbolic gesturing, filling a diversity quota without addressing the systemic problem at hand.

Women who are used in this way can often find that they are bound to this enforced identity—they become ‘the woman’—and their actual qualifications and expertise are overlooked and overshadowed by their positionality as a diversity hire. In this way, they are perceived as little more than their assigned label, and it’s insulting.

This isn’t true diversity, this is a problem, and this is precisely what gender quotas look like when they are done wrong: tokenism.

Clearly, a great deal needs to change, especially if we are to meet the UN’s Global Goal of gender equality by 2030.

This is what led us to take a different approach in our study. Instead of focusing solely on overall board representation, we aimed to investigate who got appointed to the most influential board committees.

International research

To do this, my co-researchers and I analysed 3,500 publicly listed firms across 25 countries. We wanted to examine the way in which national quotas and corporate ownership influence the likelihood that firms appoint female members to directorial positions on major board committees (i.e., the audit, remuneration, and nominating committees).

We looked at two key drivers: national quotas (policies mandating a certain percentage of women to be appointed to boards) and firm ownership (state, institutional or family ownership).

The results were positive. We discovered that quotas did not just operate at a surface level. Using quotas correctly does, in reality, lead to actions and practices that challenge power structures, which eventually results in more women appointed to major board committees (MBCs), relative to their presence on boards of directors.

This was reassuring from a tokenism point of view, as it proved that gender quotas do result in tangible influence, as opposed to merely representation alone.

Ownership and diversity

We also found that corporate ownership has a strong influence on this gender diversity on MBCs. Institutional investors and state-owned firms tend to be more supportive of female representation on MBCs, whereas family-owned companies appear to hold more conservative values, and therefore decrease gender diversity on MBCs.

For governments, the takeaway is clear: well-crafted gender quotas do not lead to empty representation, and quota-based measures can thus be a stepping stone towards positions of real influence on the board.

For family firms, they can reflect on how they could improve their recruitment and training processes in order to make their firms more progressive and thus more attractive to both entry-level female workers and highly skilled female board members.

For institutional investors and governance activists, the findings affirm that ownership is power. By using their influence to support substantive inclusion, rather than just diversity alone, investors can push for governance practices that are both fair and effective.

What this research makes clear is that gender quotas, when designed thoughtfully, with the correct intentions in mind, can transform power structures. They’re not a quick fix, but they are a meaningful step towards a future where inclusion isn’t performative.

Jean-Luc Arrègle is professor in the Department of Strategy & Organisation at emlyon business school in Lyon, France.