More women in the boardroom can lead to safer companies

Including women in corporate boardrooms does more than diversify leadership—recent research shows it can also lead to safer job sites, potentially saving companies from costly safety incidents. Companies with more women on their boards tend to have fewer workplace safety incidents—especially when these women hold positions of power within the board, according to an analysis of workplace safety at 266 companies between 2002 and 2011. These findings were published in April in the Journal of Operations Management. “What’s cool about this paper is . . . by exploring the human element, it really sheds a new light on the firm’s operations and why there’s variability in different operational processes,” said study coauthor Kaitlin Wowak, an associate professor of business analytics at the University of Notre Dame. Companies in the U.S. spend more than a billion dollars each week on workplace safety incidents. These incidents—which range from strikes and shutdowns to worker injuries—cause reputational harm and lost profits and can lead to loss of life or limb for employees. Learning more about how workplace leadership impacts safety is one step toward mitigating these harms. To gauge differences in workplace safety between the companies analyzed, the study authors examined data from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), director-level information from Institutional Shareholder Services, and regulatory violation data from the Violation Tracker database. They found boards with more women had fewer recorded incidents. These safety benefits were even more pronounced when women held positions of power on the board, such as seats on influential committees, researchers found. When women have these positions of power, they are not only able to express their perspectives more freely, but others also pay more attention to their ideas, explained Corinne Post, coauthor of the study and professor of business leadership, management, and operations at Villanova University. The researchers theorize that the difference in safety outcomes between boards with and without women may come down to men and women having different socio-cognitive approaches to stakeholder concerns, risk assessment, and regulatory compliance. These different approaches stem from having different experiences to bring to boardroom discussions. Women are, for example, more likely to have experience with community outreach and philanthropy, researchers note in the study. Having these different specialties and experiences represented in decision-making are a benefit of diversified leadership more broadly, the researchers say. “It’s not just gender diversity, too, it’s all forms of diversity [that are important],” Wowak said. “When you have different backgrounds and different cognitions, you bring a different perspective to decision making that’s truly beneficial.” This research is the first to establish a link between operational safety and diversity in upper leadership, adding to a growing literature that provides the business case for diverse leadership. “I was happy to see the findings, but not surprised,” said Michael Abebe, a professor of management at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley who researches diversity in business leadership. He said the new study shows another facet of the benefits gender diversity in leadership can bring to a company—and how the research focus on diversity in leadership has changed over time. Abebe mentions that for many years, studies about diversity in leadership generally focused on the “glass ceiling,” an invisible barrier that keeps women and minorities out of leadership even in otherwise diverse professions. But over the years, the field of study evolved to focus on the business case of diversifying companies—and how more diverse leaders can lead to positive business outcomes. The paper’s authors acknowledge that this field of study is relatively new and say there is still a lot to explore at the board level and beyond. “There are multiple different echelons that future scholars should explore, because they all impact a firm’s operations in potentially different ways,” Wowak said. For companies looking to turn these present and future research findings into real change, Abebe recommends “rethinking how we recruit, where we recruit, and go beyond the conventional” to create more pathways to the top for women in the workforce. “Having women on the board does present an opportunity to really run better businesses,” Post said. “It’s not just about putting women in there . . . but it’s putting them in a position where they can actually voice their ideas more.”

Jun 18, 2025 - 12:40

More women in the boardroom can lead to safer companies

Including women in corporate boardrooms does more than diversify leadership—recent research shows it can also lead to safer job sites, potentially saving companies from costly safety incidents.

Companies with more women on their boards tend to have fewer workplace safety incidents—especially when these women hold positions of power within the board, according to an analysis of workplace safety at 266 companies between 2002 and 2011. These findings were published in April in the Journal of Operations Management.

“What’s cool about this paper is . . . by exploring the human element, it really sheds a new light on the firm’s operations and why there’s variability in different operational processes,” said study coauthor Kaitlin Wowak, an associate professor of business analytics at the University of Notre Dame.

Companies in the U.S. spend more than a billion dollars each week on workplace safety incidents. These incidents—which range from strikes and shutdowns to worker injuries—cause reputational harm and lost profits and can lead to loss of life or limb for employees. Learning more about how workplace leadership impacts safety is one step toward mitigating these harms.

To gauge differences in workplace safety between the companies analyzed, the study authors examined data from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), director-level information from Institutional Shareholder Services, and regulatory violation data from the Violation Tracker database. They found boards with more women had fewer recorded incidents.

These safety benefits were even more pronounced when women held positions of power on the board, such as seats on influential committees, researchers found. When women have these positions of power, they are not only able to express their perspectives more freely, but others also pay more attention to their ideas, explained Corinne Post, coauthor of the study and professor of business leadership, management, and operations at Villanova University.

The researchers theorize that the difference in safety outcomes between boards with and without women may come down to men and women having different socio-cognitive approaches to stakeholder concerns, risk assessment, and regulatory compliance. These different approaches stem from having different experiences to bring to boardroom discussions. Women are, for example, more likely to have experience with community outreach and philanthropy, researchers note in the study. Having these different specialties and experiences represented in decision-making are a benefit of diversified leadership more broadly, the researchers say.

“It’s not just gender diversity, too, it’s all forms of diversity [that are important],” Wowak said. “When you have different backgrounds and different cognitions, you bring a different perspective to decision making that’s truly beneficial.”

This research is the first to establish a link between operational safety and diversity in upper leadership, adding to a growing literature that provides the business case for diverse leadership.

“I was happy to see the findings, but not surprised,” said Michael Abebe, a professor of management at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley who researches diversity in business leadership. He said the new study shows another facet of the benefits gender diversity in leadership can bring to a company—and how the research focus on diversity in leadership has changed over time.

Abebe mentions that for many years, studies about diversity in leadership generally focused on the “glass ceiling,” an invisible barrier that keeps women and minorities out of leadership even in otherwise diverse professions. But over the years, the field of study evolved to focus on the business case of diversifying companies—and how more diverse leaders can lead to positive business outcomes.

The paper’s authors acknowledge that this field of study is relatively new and say there is still a lot to explore at the board level and beyond. “There are multiple different echelons that future scholars should explore, because they all impact a firm’s operations in potentially different ways,” Wowak said.

For companies looking to turn these present and future research findings into real change, Abebe recommends “rethinking how we recruit, where we recruit, and go beyond the conventional” to create more pathways to the top for women in the workforce.

“Having women on the board does present an opportunity to really run better businesses,” Post said. “It’s not just about putting women in there . . . but it’s putting them in a position where they can actually voice their ideas more.”