Equality at the Top of the Corporation: Assessing Possible Worlds of Mandated Quotas

A firm is conventionally defined as an economic entity, but it is also a social community that is often subject to broader debates regarding social justice and its ethical commitments to possible and, for some, preferable worlds. A challenge to social science is how to analyze strategies to achieve possible worlds that do not exist. We propose a methodology to assess polices to address a stunning property of the governance of corporations, namely, the paucity of female directors to corporate boards. Using estimates from the social experiment of imposing quotas on Norwegian boards of directors, we apply an agent-based model to American board data to show that modest numerical quotas quickly generate well-connected networks of women directors who attain equality in their centrality and influence.