Diversity, Gender and Quotas: Some academic Evidence

In the Winter 2012 issue of e-Organisations & People an article by Sue Lieberman was reprinted (originally Lieberman, 1995) exploring the different views and behaviours of men and women in the workplace. Its key assumption was that a better understanding of these issues may be useful for the organisation. While the above mentioned article raises a lot of important issues, the instances described are single cases combined with anecdotal evidence. Thus, it would be interesting to investigate such diversity issues in a more systematic way. In this article I briefly describe two research projects trying to take a more systematic approach. To put this in a wider context I outline the debate on gender quotas for boards briefly in the following section.