Does Mandating Women on Corporate Boards Backfire?
Abstract
We examine the labor demand-side consequences of mandating female representationon corporate boards. Using California’s SB 826 as an exogenous shock and applying
computational linguistic methods to job ads, we find that the mandate significantly
reduced treated firms’ demand for female labor. We also show that SB 826 led to fewer
female new hires, with both effects more pronounced in high individualism, Republicanleaning,
and high masculinity counties/firms. Additionally, the mandate resulted in
poorer workplace treatment of women and increased female employee turnover. Experimental
evidence points to psychological reactance and perceived violations of gender
norms as key underlying mechanisms. Our findings complement Bertrand et al. (2019),
which documents limited spillovers from a similar quota in Norway, by uncovering evidence
of backlash in less gender-equal contexts. These results highlight how misalignment
between policy goals and prevailing social norms can undermine the intended
goals of gender quotas, underscoring the need for context-specific policy design.