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INTRODUCTION
According to corporate law, publicly traded corporations are required to have boards of directors. The directors have the legal authority for controlling and maintaining organizational operation and effectiveness(7). As the stockholders' formal representatives, board members bear the ultimate responsibility for supervising management's performance.
However, the recent takeover battles involving some of the largest corporations, along with the increased risks of personal legal liability, have resulted in a growing concern over the role and functions of the board's members. More recently, the Savings and Loan crisis has raised important questions regarding the board's level of involvement and its ethical and social responsibilities in corporate decision making(23).
A number of writers have expressed the need to study upper echelon characteristics in order to understand an organization's strategic processes(24). Hambrick and Mason (1984) have proposed a number of hypotheses for testing the relationship between organizational outcomes and certain demographic characteristics of top executives. They assert that strategic decisions reflect the background of the organization's most powerful managers and what the organization does could be explained, at least in part, by the profile of its upper echelon.
Consistent with this view, a relatively small body of literature has focused on the effect of the background characteristics of one segment of the firm's upper echelon -- its board of directors -- on such areas as company performance(28,36), corporate social responsiveness(27), board committee membership(19), CEO succession(21), and board members' involvement in the strategic management process(17). Yet, in spite of this increased attention, there is still one area about which little is known -- the possible impact of a member's gender on the strategic management of the firm.
The present study was designed to investigate such a possibility. Specifically, we designed the study to determine whether a relationship existed between board members' gender and their corporate social responsiveness orientation.
DIRECTORS' GENDER
A number of studies of female directors have been published in recent years(1,8,14). They show that while the number of female directors is growing(8,34), their overall percentage continues to be rather small(3,8). For example, in 1986 women held "only 3% to 4% of Fortune 1,000 directorships despite their majority place in the workforce(2)."
Critics have charged that the preponderance of male directors on corporate boards may be due to the...