Gender analysis and attention to gender: An experimental framework

Gender aspects are gaining more and more attention for policy makers, practitioners and faculties. They also have a great importance for funding purposes, since many calls for proposals by national and international agencies require a gender plan and/or an analysis of the gender aspect, especially referring to the extent to which a candidate research project affects differently men and women. In this context, we want to understand whether there exists a relationship between the gender diversity of corporate boards of directors and the way a business articulates gender aspects on their corporate communications and activities on the Internet. To achieve this goal, we created a set of meaningful keywords, coming from EU regulations, gender plan descriptions of EU funded projects, and genderrelated literature. Then, we shall use business intelligence tools to determine the occurrences of such keywords on the websites of the firms considered. Our goal is to determine the relationship between the occurrence of these keywords and the relative presence of women in a firm board of directors, in order to understand whether the board’s gender diversity is somewhat correlated to the way a business “talks” about gender aspects in its website. A neural network analysis is also devoted to this goal.