Board diversity in the United Kingdom and Norway: an exploratory analysis Johanne Grosvold, Stephen Brammer and Bruce Rayton n Introduction In spite of considerable progress during the last 20 years, corporate board members remain largely white, male and middle aged (Bilimoria & Piderit 1994, Conyon & Mallin 1997, Singh et al. 2001, Daily & Dalton 2003a, b, Singh & Vinnicombe 2004). A growing academic and practitioner literature has highlighted the homogeneity of corporate boards and has suggested that this raises significant ethical, political and economic issues (e.g. Bilimoria & Piderit 1994, Conyon & Mallin 1997, Singh et al. 2001, Carter et al. 2003, Daily & Dalton 2003a, b). The widespread recog- nition of the difficulties involved in improving the gender balance of corporate boards has prompted the introduction of a number of initiatives such as those that support the educational development of women leaders, mentoring activities within organisations, the generation of increased media attention, 1 more sustained political pressure and, in some countries, legislative compulsion. Diversity issues have recently acquired a higher level of strategic salience within organisations for several reasons. First, institutional investors have begun to implement diversity screens as part of their investment practices and a commitment to diversity in employment practices is part of the inclusion criteria for many socially responsible investment indices (e.g. FTSE4Good). Second, board diversity is desired by customers, employees and other stakeholders for whom it is a demon- stration of the sensitivity of management to stakeholder preferences, aspirations and concerns that may bring benefits through improved custo- mer loyalty, and employee motivation and reten- tion (Powell 1999, Bilimoria & Wheeler 2000). Third, board diversity issues have been the subject of discussions of best practice in corporate governance. For example, the recent Higgs Re- view of the role and effectiveness of non-executive directorships highlighted that ‘the current popula- tion of non-executive directors is narrowly drawn’ (Higgs 2003: 13) being mostly, ‘white males nearing retirement age with previous PLC director experience’ (Higgs 2003: 42). Furthermore, the Review argued that ‘a commitment to equal opportunities . . . is inevitably undermined if the board itself does not follow the same guiding principles’ (Higgs 2003: 42). Existing conceptual and empirical work has defined and measured board diversity in a variety of ways. As van der Walt & Ingley (2003: 219) argue, ‘the concept of diversity relates to board composition and the varied combination of attri- butes, characteristics and expertise contributed by individual board members’. Within this definition, a primary distinction has been made between demographic (i.e. observable) and cognitive n Respectively: Research Student, Senior Lecturer and Lecturer at the School of Management, University of Bath, UK. r 2007 The Authors Journal compilation r 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main St, Malden, MA 02148, USA 344 Business Ethics: A European Review Volume 16 Number 4 October 2007