External pressures from shareholders and stakeholders to enhance diversity on US boards have led to an increase in number of women directors, who, despite being numerically scarce compared to men, are increasingly holding multiple external board positions simultaneously—a practice known as multiboarding of directors. At the same time, regulatory and advisory bodies have begun to scrutinize multiboarding for its inefficacy, and some boards even limit the ability of their CEOs to serve on multiple boards, which is consequential for women CEOs and their decisions (of multiboarding) since they face additional constraints and backlash due to gender stereotypes. Under these conditions, whether women in the upper echelons benefit from or are constrained by these institutional shifts in the board context remains an open question. In this work, we specifically examine how women CEOs make choices regarding their external board service. Drawing on rational choice theory and social networks, we argue for and find evidence to support the notion that women CEOs gain a structural status advantage in constrained multiboarding environments by leveraging their distinct and superior alternatives in outside board positions, allowing them to dissolve existing ties and forming new ties at a faster pace with more reputed firms. We empirically test these predictions using stochastic actor-oriented modeling to analyze changes to the directorship ties of Fortune 500 CEOs between 2011 and 2019.
