Chapter 5: Directors’ Discursive Resistance to Gender Board Quota: The Belgian Case

In the past several years, a number of countries have adopted binding legislation to redress board inequality. Through these legislative measures, such as gender board quotas, the state can mandate corporations to increase the number of women on their boards, with the double aim of increasing gender equality and enhancing the functioning of the boards in terms of good corporate governance (Kang, Cheng, & Gray, 2007; Oliveira & Gondek, 2014). A quota is an “institutionalized form of combating discrimination towards minority groups and structural inequalities” (Gröschl & Takagi, 2012, p. 1) through proportional representation based on a particular category, such as gender. A gender board quota represents a “fast track” to gender equality as it restricts corporate boards’ autonomy to draw almost exclusively men into their ranks and thereby redresses men’s historical dominance at the top of firms (Singh & Vinnicombe, 2004; Teigen, 2012a).