How sexism influenced corporate governance

EARLY in the 20th century, many owners of the iconic companies of the day were women. Before the 1929 stock market crash, female shareholders outnumbered male shareholders at AT&T, General Electric and the Pennsylvania Railroad (even though the men owned more shares).

But men had little respect for women’s ability to exercise their rights as owners to discipline company management. “You might as well ask the clouds in the air to propel the railroad locomotives,” William Cook, a widely read legal scholar, wrote in 1914.

This combination — the feminisation of capital and men’s disdain for it — has had repercussions right up to today, according to an important article this year in Stanford Law Review by Sarah Haan, a professor at Washington and Lee University School of Law.