Gender Quotas for Corporate Boards and Democratic Legitimacy

This debate will address the controversy surrounding the use of quotas as a legal mechanism to address gender inequality in corporate boards of directors.

Much of the public and scholarly debate on the issue has focused on the business and equal opportunity justifications for using quotas to increase the proportion of women on corporate boards. This workshop seeks to highlight and explore the more complex and innovative democratic legitimacy justification, which contends that democracy demands that men and women should be represented in equal numbers on the boards of influential companies.