Corporate women in Australian and Chilean business elites

Businesswomen have been largely invisible and difficult to track in history. In the topic of corporate power and women networks, recent studies have emphasised that corporate elites have until very recently been all-male bastions. However, few analyses have tried to trace back the female board participation and the process of a possible increase in the feminisation of corporate elites in emerging economies during the last century. To address this issue, we study the process of women directors’ incorporation in Argentina and Chile from a long-term perspective. We find that females found their way into corporate boards in different ways and also on different moments. Most importantly, in the last years, we detected that more women are invited to boards, but they are not integrated into the corporate elite networks as men do, given that women still occupy a peripheral position in the network.

About the speaker

Erica Salvaj is Professor of General Management and Strategy at Universidad del Desarrollo (UDD), Chile, and Visiting Scholar at Universidad Torcuato Di Tella, Argentina. Her visit to the Centre for Workforce Futures at Macquarie Business School has been funded by an Australia-APEC Women’s Fellowship to collaborate with Professor Lucy Taksa on a project entitled: ‘Corporate Women’s representation in Australian and Chilean business elites, 2000–2019’.

Her primary fields of research are strategy, leadership, social networks, corporate governance, international business, diversity and business history. She completed her PhD in Business Administration at IESE Business School, Barcelona, was GCEE Fellow at Babson College and has received fellowships and research grants from the Argentinean and Chilean National Commissions for Scientific and Technological Research. She was awarded an ‘Alfred Chandler’ fellowship at Harvard Business School where she conducted research as part of the ‘Creating Emerging Markets’ project between September 2017 and February 2018 on 130 interviews by Harvard faculty with high impact leaders in business and social enterprise.

Her publications have appeared in leading journals including Global Strategy Journal, Journal of Business Research, Harvard Business Review, Business History, Enterprise and Society, Business History Review, Corporate Governance: an International Review, Harvard Deusto Business Review, Academy of Management Proceedings and IESE Insight among others.

Date and Time

Wed., 26 February 2020
2:00–3:30 PM AEDT

Location

120 Lend Lease Room
1 Management Drive, Macquarie University
North Ryde NSW 2109

Corporate women in Australian and Chilean business elites