Pace International Law Review is honored to feature articles from its Spring 2013 symposium on Comparative Sex Regimes and Corporate Governance. Today, we share A Difficult Conversation: Corporate Directors on Race and Gender , by Kimberly D. Kraweic, John M. Conley and Lissa L. Broom. Kimberly D. Kraweic is a professor at Duke Law, an expert on corporate law and teaches course on securities, corporate and derivatives law. John M. Conley is a professor at University of North Carolina School of Law, received his J.D. from Duke University and a Ph.D. in anthropology from Duke University.  Lissa L. Broome is also part of University of North Carolina School of Law, received her J.D. from Harvard University, she is the director of UNC’s school Center for Banking and Finance , and she serves as a faculty advisor to the North Carolina Banking Institute Journal. This article summarizes their research on ongoing ethnographic research on corporate board diversity and incorporates interviews of directors and other persons of interest regarding their views on race gender and diversity in the boardroom:

Using a method rooted in anthropology and discourse analysis, we have worked from a general topic outline and conducted open-ended interviews in which respondents are encouraged to raise and develop issues of interest to them. The interviews range from forty-five minutes to two hours in length and each interview is taped and transcribed. As a group, we then listen to each taped interview at least once with transcript in hand, analyzing each interview qualitatively with a focus on the themes that the respondents identify, the emphases given to these themes, the stories (or narratives) that they tell, and the details of the language that they use. We also thematically code the transcripts and use sorting software to get another, complementary view of the frequency and distribution of the various themes.

The analyze and expound on the central tensions in the directors’ accounts of race and gender in the boardroom. Enjoy reading the full article, A Difficult Conversation: Corporate Directors on Race and Gender.