Many environmental and social regulations emphasize disclosures as a means to hold organizations accountable for their progress. Organizations may want to comply with the regulations or not. To mitigate the negative impacts of non-compliance, organizations use strategic tactics in their disclosures. We investigate how organizations disclose social issues and whether their behavior is associated with change. We address this question by examining disclosures that respond to a mandatory “comply-or-explain” regulation for women’s representation on boards in which organizations must disclose their practices or provide explanations for not doing so. Results show that disclosures from organizations that do not comply substantively are more obfuscating in their language. These organizations with harder-to-read disclosures do not significantly improve women’s representation on their boards in the ensuing years. This paper seeks to the literature on decoupling and diversity by suggesting that external pressures solely based on transparency are insufficient to improve the status quo.

Biography

Daphné Baldassari is a Ph.D. candidate of Strategic Management at the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto, and a doctoral fellow at the Institute for Gender and the Economy. Daphné’s primary research interests are related to workplace inequality and organizations’ role in reproducing inequality. Particularly, she focuses on understanding how firms strategically respond to structural interventions, not aimed at changing individuals’ beliefs but at reforming the system. Using various settings and mixed methods, she investigates firms’ narratives and strategic decisions in response to these interventions and the drivers of firms’ heterogeneity in their approach. In another stream of research, she also considers how gender influences individuals’ decision to share knowledge and its impact on a firm’s performance. Daphné has an MS with honors in Engineering from Mines ParisTech and an MS with honors in Economics from Paris School of Economics.