1.5.4 Governmental and organizational interventions

Within the context of this research, the term governmental interventions is used to refer to affirmative action measures, or positive action measures,1 implemented by governments that aim to achieve gender equality at the corporate top of companies. Affirmative action measures are defined as: ‘programmes which take some kind of initiative, either voluntarily or under the compulsion of law, to increase, maintain or rearrange the number or status of certain group members usually defined by race or gender, within a larger group’.2 These affirmative action measures are used by governments in order to achieve gender equality.3 This is also expressed in the following quote:

In this PhD dissertation, the term governmental interventions refers to (the adoption of) gender quota by countries in order to achieve gender equality in company boards and at the corporate top. Organizational interventions as a term is used to refer to interventions implemented by companies to achieve gender equality at the corporate top. Notably, in Chapter 4 the term ‘measures’ is employed rather than interventions, because in the research underpinning this chapter the Dutch legal term for interventions is ‘maatregelen’, which translates into English as ‘measures’. Furthermore, this term was also used in the questionnaire that was used for the empirical study conducted at 72 and 75 listed companies in the Netherlands for the financial years of 2013 and 2014 respectively. The term measures in Chapter 4 refers to organizational interventions.