Published on: July 24, 2026 at 10:46 am
By Nick Keppler
Russians can’t get a delivery from Amazon. They can’t eat at McDonalds. They can’t see Zootopia 2 or anything else from Disney. They can’t buy an iPhone and some apps stopped working on the phones they had. They can’t sip a Starbucks coffee or kick back with a Budweiser beer. They can’t rent their spare room on Airbnb. If they’re in the market for a new car, they can’t hope to buy anything from GM, BMW, Honda, Hyundai, Toyota, Ford, or most other internationally recognized automakers.
Hundreds of the world’s largest corporations suspended or completely terminated their dealings in Russia in response to aggression ordered by Vladimir Putin dating back to the 2014 Russian invasion and annexation of the Crimea province of Ukraine followed by the 2022 full-scale invasion of the rest of Ukraine. The war is ongoing to this day.
However, boycotts have not been universal. Many multinational companies continue to do business there as usual.
In his investigation into corporate responses to the war, Academy of Management Scholar Andre Havrylyshyn of Binghamton University found that the presence of women on corporate boards was associated with divestment from Russia.
“We thought that was interesting because, ultimately, it’s quite adversarial,” he said. “It’s basically private for-profit firms engaging in economic war against the Kremlin.”
A large body of research has attempted to gauge the impact of women in leadership positions on organizational behavior. Some of it indicates that they correlate positively with efforts towards corporate social responsibility (CSR) and ethics, but on the whole, such inquiry is a minefield for gender assumptions.
Some scholars have pointed out that the women who reach leadership positions tend to have certain backgrounds and personalities that should not be generalized to be representative of all women. Also, organizations without leaders and managers with the mentality that maintains glass ceilings for women and people from marginalized groups may generally be more responsive to CSR and the need to combat social ills than those without them. Havrylyshyn said that the finding extends prior research findings that women in leadership will benefit a cause that is “pro-social, but perceived to be somewhat feminine, like helping the environment.”
Their impact may bear out in “stances that are aggressive and adversarial to those responsible for social ills.”
