Deborah Dean

Kim Hoque

Meryl Bushell

This book makes a significant and distinctive contribution to the literature on women in the boardroom by developing the concept of the ‘network trap’ to explain both female underrepresentation in board-level roles and also why current efforts to improve the situation are likely to be of limited value. It features extensive interviews with UK FTSE 250 board Chairs, boardroom aspirants and head-hunters, allowing for uniquely high levels of empirical rigour. The book begins by outlining the difficulties women experience in achieving board-level roles. It then investigates a range of theoretical explanations for these difficulties, and in doing so it identifies the particular potency of network-related explanations. The empirical analysis the book provides enhances our understanding and advances current debates and theorisation within the literature, as well as offering a range of practical and policy implications.

Why Women Struggle to Make It into the Boardroom

The Network Trap

As we begin the third decade of the twenty-first century, women have entered the workplace in unprecedented numbers, are now outperforming men in terms of educational qualifications, and are excelling across a range of professional fields. Yet men continue to occupy the positions of real power in large corporations. This book draws on unique, unprecedented access to Chairs of FTSE 350 Chairs, boardroom aspirants and executive head-hunters, to explain why this is the case. The analysis it presents establishes that the relative absence of women in boardroom roles is not explained by their lack of relevant skills, experience or ambition, but instead by their exclusion from the powerful male-dominated networks of key organisational decision-makers. It is from within these networks that candidates are sourced, endorsed, sponsored, and championed. Yet women’s efforts to penetrate these networks are instead likely to trap them into network relationships that will be of little value in helping them to fulfil their career aspirations. The analysis also identifies why women struggle to gain access to these networks, and in doing so, it demonstrates that the network trap in which women find themselves will not be overcome simply by encouraging them to change their networking behaviours. Instead, there is a need for a fundamental reconsideration of how boardroom recruitment and selection is conducted and regulated, to ensure the development of a more open, transparent and equitable process.

Meryl Bushell

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