When prestige becomes a constraint for women at the top
New research finds top board roles can quietly limit, not expand, women’s future opportunities
Serving on the board of a major company is widely assumed to be a springboard to further influence. But new research, Unequal in the Spotlight: Gender Differences in How Serving on Prominent Firms Affects Directors’ New Board Appointments (Administrative Science Quarterly, 8 January, 2026) shows that this logic does not apply evenly to women and men at the top of corporate life.
Drawing on population-level data on FTSE-100 directors between 2010 and 2017, the study examines how firm prominence shapes directors’ chances of securing additional board appointments. The authors, who include London Business School’s Isabel Fernandez-Mateo, Hans Frankort of Bayes Business School and Raina Brands, UCL School of Management, find that while women directors are, on average, more likely than men to gain new board roles, reflecting sustained pressure for gender diversity, this advantage fades as the prominence of the firm increases.
The pattern is stark. Serving on more-prominent FTSE-100 boards increases men’s likelihood of obtaining further appointments but reduces women’s. At the highest levels of corporate prominence, women’s initial advantage not only disappears but reverses.
Conventional explanations offer little traction. The evidence does not strongly support claims that firms systematically discount women’s competence, nor that women are simply more constrained in their capacity to serve. Instead, the authors point to the lived experience of prominence itself: heightened scrutiny, greater reputational risk, and heavier informal demands may make the most prominent board roles less attractive, or less sustainable, for women.
The study reframes prominence as a double-edged asset. Elite affiliations can create opportunity, but they can also impose gendered constraints that quietly shape who advances further. Even at the summit of corporate governance, the research suggests, inequality is not only about access to top roles, but about what those roles demand, and from whom.