Publications
Publications
- 2017
- Academy of Management Best Paper Proceedings
New Venture Milestones and the First Female Board Member
By: Alicia DeSantola, Lakshmi Ramarajan and Julie Battilana
Abstract
We explore the antecedents of the addition of the first woman to the boards of directors of entrepreneurial ventures. Building on research on resource dependency, we propose that new ventures are most likely to add the first woman to their boards at three developmental moments– board founding, fundraising, and the IPO– as a consequence of shifting alignments of resource control. A critical contingency to changes at the time of these milestones is the presence of resource holders who value the inclusion of women. We draw on an extensive handcrafted dataset on the boards of 2,425 U.S.-based new ventures to test these predictions. Our findings reveal that the first woman is likely to be added at the time of board formation if the founder-CEO is a woman and at the time of fundraising if the venture capital investment firm has a senior female partner. They also show that ventures are likely to add a woman to their board at the time of the IPO if they have not yet done so, but are unlikely to add a second. Our findings have implications for research on gender and entrepreneurship, women on boards, and the sociology of markets.
Keywords
Boards Of Directors; Governing and Advisory Boards; Entrepreneurship; Gender; Diversity; Technology Industry; United States
Citation
DeSantola, Alicia, Lakshmi Ramarajan, and Julie Battilana. "New Venture Milestones and the First Female Board Member." Academy of Management Best Paper Proceedings (2017).
About The Authors
