Women in corporate networks: An introduction

Abstract

This article is designed as an introduction to the Business History special issue, ‘Women in corporate networks’. To begin, we address the main theoretical and methodological issues. We argue that business historians should engage in greater dialogue with feminist approaches, by which we mean a study of the gendered nature of power relations in business networks. We show that network analysis can be a useful tool for mapping the gendered structure of the corporate elite. We also argue that empirical analysis should focus on the profile of firms, which have recruited – or excluded – women, and provide historical profiles of women who made their way onto corporate boards. We then present the main results of the empirical case studies conducted in the special issue, highlighting the similarities and differences in the national ­contexts. Finally, we discuss the limits of the concept of ‘board diversity’ and its application.