2.1 Introduction

Women’s underrepresentation in higher corporate decision-making positions is a persistent worldwide phenomenon.1 The question of why women are still underrepresented at the corporate top has not yet been adequately answered.2 Barriers are often presented in a scattered way and explained from a single discipline.3 Multidisciplinary systematic reviews can be found,4 but the barriers in these articles are mostly presented as ‘pushes and pulls barriers’, ‘supply and demand perspectives’ or barriers on micro, meso and macro-level.5 This review covers studies from multiple disciplines to provide an integrative and holistic overview of the literature concerning women’s underrepresentation at the corporate top (barriers) in Europe. This review first systematically identifies and analyzes the barriers. The authors demonstrate the inherent difficulty in assigning barriers to different categories at the individual or organizational level, as most of the barriers are multifaceted and could fit into more than one category. Second, this review shows that barriers cannot be examined in isolation, which requires research into the interrelatedness of barriers. Accordingly, the review presents a conceptual framework that reveals the interrelatedness of the identified barriers.

This review has a geographic focus on Europe. The justification is that the EU and associated European countries have championed the development of policies, which aim to tackle issues of gender inequality. The EU Directive 2014/95 requires listed companies to include in their corporate governance statement a description of their policy pertaining to gender board representation and their policies to achieve gender equality.6 Additionally, some EU Member States and associated European countries issued national legislation requiring large companies to have diverse corporate boards such as Norway, Spain and Belgium.7 However, several of these countries still face difficulties in producing tangible results,8 and therefore a comprehensive solution still needs to be found.9 The differences between EU countries in the numbers of women on boards – with France having the highest percentage (45 percent) and Cyprus the lowest (8.1 percent)10 – lead to a fragmentation of approaches and shows the need for a comprehensive policy solution for all EU Member States.11 The proposed EU corporate gender quota aimed to end this fragmentation.12 However, until now this proposal never made it to legislation.

To understand which public policy, legislative and corporate interventions are most suitable to enhance the number of women at the corporate top in Europe, it is required to first identify and understand which barriers hinder women the most and how these barriers interrelate to tackle women’s underrepresentation and eventually achieve gender equality. To this end, the following research question is addressed: In which way do barriers that impede women’s advancement at the corporate top in Europe interrelate according to the extant literature? To answer this question, the following sub research questions are formulated:

What are the most significant barriers? And

How do the multifaceted aspects of the barriers interrelate?

First, the theoretical framework is discussed in Section 2.2. Next, the methodology of this systematic review is explained in Section 2.3. Section 2.4 presents a categorization of the identified barriers and a conceptual framework. Section 2.5 contains the discussion and conclusions are presented in Section 2.6.