Does Gender Matter? Determinants of Women's Representation on Corporate Boards of Firms Owned by the Czech Statutory Cities

Using data on 26 large Czech municipalities, this paper looks at the extent to which political opportunity structure determines women's descriptive representation on corporate boards of firms which are owned by Czech statutory cities, or more precisely on boards of directors and on supervisory boards. We show that women are significantly advantaged in municipalities where political environment (culture) is characterised with more "openness" to women (i.e. those with more women in city councils/city boards or especially those with female mayors). On the other hand, the effect of most other variables was contradictory or very small. One of the exceptions was municipality size, which decreased women's descriptive representation on supervisory boards but at the same time increased their representation on boards of directors.