Despite their economic prominence, private firms have been largely absent from research and policy discussions on board gender diversity. In this paper, we investigate whether and how private firms address board gender diversity. Relying on symbolic management and institutional theories, we posit that private firms balance external pressures for board gender diversity with the potential for symbolic compliance. Using a novel data set covering four and a half million private firms in nearly thirty European countries over the past thirty years, we find evidence of a persistent "one woman board" effect in private firms. Our methodological approaches allow us to tease out the possibility of our results being driven by a lack of women candidates. That is, our approach permits us to tease out demand vs. supply-driven reasons for the "one woman board" effect we find. We interpret this symbolic minimum threshold as a token response by private firms to the external pressures they may be under to enhance their legitimacy. As private firms remain out of the scope of regulation around board gender diversity, the implicit quota consisting of a "one woman board" we find in this study may well remain in a similar way to that in top management roles.
