Are Corporate Governance laws in Germany effective in reducing the gender pay and career gap in male-dominated industries?

Despite significant labor market progress over the last decades, women remain heavily underrepresented in high-earning, high-status occupations (Bertrand et al., 2014). The gender pay gap in Germany has been locked in at a little over 20% for the last few years with no change in sight (o.V.,2020). Similarly, access to top management and board positions is still very difficult for women: In 2020, amongst the C-level positions in Corporate Germany 2 less than 11% have been held by women, with none of these being CEO. On board level3, women hold 32.2% of the seats of these 100 companies, with a slight upward trend (Schulz-Strelow, 2020). Advancing gender equality and female representation in corporate governance has increasingly become a focus of societal and political debate in various countries (Pande & Ford, 2012). One prominent argument alongside equal rights favors a quota for women or other minorities to impact women's corporate success, which was discussed in many studies with ambiguous results (Pletzer et al., 2015). The latest McKinsey study on Diversity reaffirms the strong business case for both gender diversity and ethnic and cultural diversity in corporate leadership and shows that this business case continues to strengthen. The most diverse companies are now more likely than ever to outperform less diverse peers on profitability (Dixon-fyle et al., 2020, p. 145). The main argument in many of these studies is that company boards, which are still mostly homogenous, need to diversify to ensure that corporate boards make better decisions (Hansch, 2021). Many countries have introduced regulations that have been justified with a mix of different policy rationales. The two main rationales detail that gender diversity furthers gender equality, and that it is profitable for businesses to have more women on their boards. The business rationale canvasses that board gender diversity is beneficial for companies. It attempts to show that board gender diversity results in increased shareholder value. The equality rationale for introducing laws to ensure more women directors on corporate boards is, in essence, that in an equal society. The aim of this study is to analyze the status of women's participation at managerial level in logistics based on a dataset of the top 100 German logistics companies and interviews with female managers. This will allow us to assess to what extent legal changes have affected the situation of female managers in traditionally male-dominated industries.