Our research   was accepted for presentation at the first, and hopefully not last, FROGEE workshop "Economic Perspectives on Gender Inequality." The event was prepared for researchers at the early stages of the career, and focused on research from members of the FROGEE network, mostly from Central and Eastern Europe. It was a wonderful opportunity to exchange ideas, and in my case, to finally visit Szczecin, the home city of one of Poland's best research centers in economics: CenEA.

GRAPE was present at the workshop with three different papers.

The first paper addresses the question of whether increasing the presence of women in a given industry has positive spillover effects on gender inequality among workers. Theory is ambiguous about this point, as female CEO can (but do not necessarily) advance the causes of women. Particularly, a single (token) woman on board is quite unlikely to introduce large changes. Empirically, the analysis presents challenges of its own, as one can expect the emergence of reverse causality, i.e. that in industries where women face lower barriers, the proportion of women on board will be larger. We address this concern using a new instrumental variable: the share of household consumption on industry output.

Our results show that increasing the share of women on boards leads to an decline in gender inequality (adjusted for differences in characteristics) within that industry. Moreover, we find that the effect increases with the number of women on boards. In other words, while each women makes a difference, the estimated coefficients are larger when boards contain two or more women. Our findings provide an additional rationale for establishing mandatory quotas.

Policy makers need to make informed decisions on the economic dilemma of underrepresentation of women's talent in boardrooms of corporate firms. The second paper addresses the problem of identifying channels of gender diversity spillovers, measuring their capacity and inferring mechanisms of transition. We are first to study gender diveristy spillovers in ownership networks medium. Moreover, we contrast the ownership network with interlocking board members network. We work with 2.5 million of private firms with managers in networks from 29 European countries. This provides a new test space between theories:
hierarchy (ownership) vs imitation (interlocks). We answer two questions 

1. Are there gender diversity spillovers through ownership networks?

There is a positive correlation between parents’ and subsidiaries’ diversities in the network. Which is even more interesting when contrasted with the fact that there are no gender diversity spillovers on average in these private firms.

2. Are the spillovers driven by power through hierarchy or by imitation of peers?

Both are statistically significant. Hierarchy and peers seem to have similar size of correlations. Convergences among peers work in both directions, but with asymmetric strength.

We are thankful to all attendants for the insightful comments and discussions.