Goodbye to a Historical Exclusion? The Journey of the Female Corporate Elite over a Century in Spain (1917–2017) Chirosa-Cañavate, Luis Garrués Irurzun, Josean Rubio Mondéjar, Juan Antonio corporate elite women on board corporate networks Recently, women’s presence on top boards of directors has significantly increased, challenging the long standing of male-led corporate elites. In light of the still-developing literature, this article provides a century-long examination of women’s entry into the Spanish corporate elite, offering several original contributions. In addition to its pioneering input into the country’s historiography, the work uses a holistic model to introduce a comparative European approach. Moreover, it empirically examines the significant yet previously unexplored impact of elite training institutions on the advancement of female directors as well as their arrival through a national holding company and their presence in leading publicly traded companies. Findings showed four distinct stages in their trajectory: discriminatory exclusion, during the first third of the twentieth century; exceptional inclusion, with early positions in their family-owned firms; gradual incorporation, with increased political representation and expanded academic access in the latter decades of the last century; and promotion, supported by twenty-first-century political strategies, while still revealing the handicap of women’s delayed entry into the corporate network. 2024-11-19T12:56:47Z 2024-11-19T12:56:47Z 2024-11-07 journal article Chirosa Cañavate, Luis, Josean Garrués-Irurzun, and Juan A. Rubio-Mondéjar. ”Enterprise & Society (2024): 1–29. [https://doi.org/10.1017/eso.2024.30] https://hdl.handle.net/10481/97103 10.1017/eso.2024.30 eng http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ open access Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 Internacional Cambridge University Press