Boston U. students and professors said Facebook and all major companies should ensure gender equality on boards of directors in light of protests against the social network’s all-male executive leadership.

Groups of demonstrators carried signs outside of Facebook’s headquarters in New York last week, denouncing the social networking company’s all-male board of directors.

The protests were part of a larger online movement started by UltraViolet, a women’s advocacy group, calling on Facebook to diversify its all-white, all-male board.

The company’s six board members are men, according to Facebook’s corporate website.

Although the company’s chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg does add a female voice to the company’s highest executive leadership, protesters focused on the board specifically, holding signs that read, ‘‘‘Like’ women on the board.”

Petitions decrying Facebook’s board garnered more than 52,000 signatures, according to the FACE IT campaign, which, along with UltraViolet, has worked to mobilize protests against what they call the board’s lack of fair gender representation.

Women make up 58 percent of Facebook’s users and are responsible for 62 percent of the sharing that happens through Facebook networks, according to the UltraViolet website.

“Women are the drivers of Facebook’s success – they comprise a majority of its users, are responsible for most of the sharing on the site and a major source of revenue for the company,” according to UltraViolet’s online petition.

Facebook’s board is problematic for activists and for the company itself, said Boston University professor Deborah Belle, director of the Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies Program.

“Gender is not the only dimension of importance. But that Facebook has no women on its board of directors is disquieting,” she said in an email interview. “I am sure it would improve its business model if it expanded its board to include women.”

Changes occur when women enter areas previously dominated by men, she said.

“I am confident that [female board members] would bring attention to issues that have been overlooked by a board without women,” she said. “This always happens when those who have been left out of the conversation are included and listened to.”

Similarly, she said, including people of different ethnicities, ages or sexualities will expand the range of the conversation on Facebook’s board of directors.

In companies that include women in managerial positions, governance is more democratic and shared rather than hierarchical, said professor Barbara Gottfried, of BU’s Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Program.

However, unrepresentative gender distributions on boards of directors are not limited to just Facebook, she said.

“Women are the majority at this university, but the president of the university isn’t a woman,” Gottfried said. “The vast majority of the board of directors at this university are not women.”

Calls for change might be better funneled toward colleges such as BU, she said. BU has nine women on its board of 41 trustees.

The Chronicle of Higher Education’s annual study of the top 10 most highly paid people at each university shows that they are almost exclusively male, Gottfried said.

“That seems to me a bit more important than Facebook,” she said.

Many students said Facebook’s all-male board is disappointing.

“Women make up a majority of the world. Minorities make up a great percentage of the world. And Facebook serves almost the entire world,” said College of Communication freshman Anya Gonzales. “How can a social network that serves almost the entire world only be made up of an all-white, all-male board of directors?”

Gunita Singh, a College of General Studies sophomore, said society has a stigma against women in powerful positions.

Women are bound to the “cult of domesticity” because they are most often caregivers, she said, adding that a woman with power defies the normal qualities associated with women.

“Most boards of directors generally have that hetero-normative, white male demographic,” she said. “It’s more important for there to be a representative population in things like public relations positions and human resources positions because those are the people that are actually doing outreach projects.”

However, College of Arts and Sciences sophomore Robbi Garza said protesting for board diversity could be valuable if protesters kept a wide perspective.

“If they’re only fighting for women to get the job [and not minorities],” he said, “they’re not doing any better than the white guys.”