6.5 Recommendations for future research

Possible avenues for future research are the following. Longitudinal research could be conducted to ascertain over time whether the adopted interventions have indeed removed the barriers that hinder women in their access to the corporate top and to gain more insight into the results of the adopted gender equality interventions, again over a longer period of time. This also enables more research about possible side effects of these interventions and provides companies and governments with a starting point.

Another recommendation for future research is that more qualitative and quantitative research needs to be conducted about organizational interventions implemented in other Dutch companies. More qualitative research needs to be conducted in Dutch companies to acquire an in-depth understanding of the type of interventions implemented by companies and of specific interventions that are perceived to work best depending on a company’s characteristics, such as size, the sector in which it operates, number of employees etc. Qualitative research can also be conducted in companies that do not perform well in terms of number of women at the corporate top, but that have implemented interventions. This to learn more about whether the success of women at the corporate top can be attributed to interventions alone, or to other factors as well. Although the findings of this research do not show that the number of women at the corporate top of the company that had implemented the most interventions is higher compared to the company with the least interventions, these interventions are still of importance.

Quantitative research can be conducted to investigate whether correlations exist between the interventions implemented and the number of women at the corporate top, for instance, to find evidence about which interventions work best to increase the number of women at the corporate top.

An additional recommendation for future research is that more research should be conducted about transformative organizational interventions in particular, because this PhD research has shown that organizations are also gendered and changing this requires transformational interventions.

Another recommendation for future research is that future research can be conducted that specifically takes the contextual factors of the Netherlands into account and compares them with contextual factors of other countries.

Finally, further research can be conducted on how the barrier gender stereotypes can be overcome in society, as this PhD research found that this is the most persistent barrier. So far, no specific interventions have been identified that deal specifically with overcoming this barrier.