Analysis of women’s participation on Turkish publicly traded company boards

In 2012, Turkish Capital Markets Board of Turkey (CMBT) took the first step about increasing women’s participation on Turkish publicly traded company boards with a soft law. However, under the framework of the Corporate Governance Principles of CMBT, the regulation did not have the intended impact and had very limited application. In order to draw attention to the issue and extend the influence of the regulation, supportive projects were launched in Turkey. On the other hand, there are significant practices to appoint more women on corporate boards in the world with some impressive results. However, the current implementation in Turkey is not effective enough to keep up with the ongoing practices around the world. In this paper, a managerial perspective was suggested to design a system that Turkish publicly traded companies could adopt in order to promote gender equality in their boards and catch up with the global trend in increasing women’s participation.