{"pk":31584,"title":"Women and M&amp;A","subtitle":null,"abstract":"<p><em>Corporations, law </em><em>fi</em><em>rms, and investment banks all state that diversity matters. This Article shows that there is a chasm between discourse and action. For the most important decisions undertaken by companies—large merger and acquisition (M&amp;A) transactions—a gender gap persists. This Article provides a holistic examination of the network of lead actors involved in M&amp;A, revealing that women’s leadership opportunities continue to be vastly unequal. Using hand-collected data from 700 transactions, this Article reveals that thirty years after women began to account for almost half of all law students, gender parity in M&amp;A leadership lags far behind. To illustrate, over a seven-year period, women make up on average 10.5% of lead legal advisors for buyers in large M&amp;A deals. Moreover, this Article documents the lack of transparency on leadership data for other players in M&amp;</em><em>A.</em><em> This Article argues that understanding, documenting, and disclosing the gender gap in M&amp;A leadership is critical for increasing accountability and for determining the solutions that may work to reduce such disparities.</em></p>","language":null,"license":{"name":"All rights reserved","short_name":"Copyright","text":"© the author(s). All rights reserved.","url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/authors"},"keywords":[],"section":"Article","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0mz311qk","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Afra","middle_name":"","last_name":"Afsharipour","name_suffix":"","institution":"","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2022-02-01T00:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/ucilr/article/31584/galley/22653/download/"}]}