Board Gender Composition and the United Way

Abstract

The U.S. nonprofit workforce is female dominated, yet its board composition and leadership still skew male. This paper argues that behind the institutionalism driving these decisions lie gender status beliefs based in Status Characteristic Theory. These beliefs influence our expectations of performance for men and women in leadership positions and set the “logics of appropriateness” for board selection. Using a panel dataset of approximately 350 United Ways, primarily from the Midwest and South, I use pooled OLS to analyze community characteristics that influence our expectations of women’s performance and may predict their presence of United Way boards of directors and in board chair positions. Findings indicate that the size of the business community, the population of a community, and historical trends in performance are all significantly and negatively related to the proportion of women on United Way boards. These, as well as rurality, impact the likelihood of having a female board chair. Expectations of women associated with these social characteristics are explored.