Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine the association between female audit committee representation and audit fees, taking into account their demographic attributes. Design/methodology/approach Research hypotheses have been tested by performing both univariate and multivariate analyses based on a sample of 790 firm-year observations from Swedish listed firms, spanning the period 2013-2017. Findings Initial finding derived from the empirical analyses provides consistent evidence of a positive association between female audit committee representation and audit fees. Controlling for self-selection bias, this finding holds unchanged. Therefore, female directors are voluntarily appointed to the companies audit committees. Including demographic attributes of women directors sitting in audit committees in the audit fees, models show that increased audit fees is driven by the level of female directors’ professional experience rather than their mere representation. Results from supplementary analysis document that the positive relationship between female audit committee representation and audit fees is more pronounced when the partner in charge of the audit engagement is a female, indicating that women presence on both the demand and supply-side of audit pricing enhance audit quality more importantly than when women are present on only the demand-side position of audit fees. Originality/value This study extends beyond recently published literature on the relation between audit committee gender-diversity and audit fees by offering a novel insight on demographic attributes of female directors enabling them to demand higher quality audits, as reflected by increased audit fees.

Purpose This paper aims to examine the impact of female board directorship on the extent of earnings management. Design/methodology/approach The research hypotheses have been tested using both univariate and multivariate analyzes based on a sample of 198 firm-year observations from closely-held family firms listed on the SBF 120 over the period 2010–2018. Findings The empirical results first indicate that female board participation reduces the level of earnings management. When looking at women positions in the companies’ boardrooms, the authors reveal that the negative linkage between female board directorship and earnings management remains constant for independent female directors while the opposite holds for their family-affiliated counterparts. Further, the gender quota reform is shown to mitigate the adverse relationship between gender-diverse corporate boards and the extent of earnings management. These results seem sound, as they hold unchanged for the several measures of, both, boardroom gender diversity and earnings management used in the empirical study. In a supplementary analysis, the authors provide evidence that the association between the presence of women directors on the companies’ boards and earnings management depends, in a different way, on the size of the audit firm in a joint auditing context. Originality/value The country and the period considered in this paper are noteworthy characteristics that enhance the value of this research. The present study is relevant because it examines the relationship between female boardroom participation and earnings management using a homogeneous sample of family-owned and -managed companies within which shareholders and board members share identical motives for manipulating earnings in one of the leading countries in the world with regard to family ownership dominance (i.e. France). Moreover, this paper is considered to be very timely, as it explores, contrarily to previous related studies, the years following the implementation of a mandatory gender quota reform in one of the less available countries, to date, that have amended a gender quota law. To the knowledge, besides France, there are a few markets (Norway, Belgium, Finland and Iceland) that have implemented such legislation.

PurposeThe paper aims to investigate the relation between the auditor's workload (LogAPW) and audit quality. Further, it explores whether the presence of a female audit partner (hereafter FEM) influences the LogAPW effect on audit quality.Design/methodology/approachA dataset of 1,629 firm-year observations from 181 companies listed in the NASDAQ OMX Stockholm for the years 2010–2018 has been analyzed. The testable hypotheses have been tested using least squares regressions clustered at the Swedish public-listed companies (client-firm) level.FindingsThe research findings first indicate that overburdened audit partners (APS) are associated with lower-quality audits, consistent with the “busyness hypothesis.” Nevertheless, the adverse association turns to be positive for FEMs, supporting the thesis that FEMs have more tendency, as compared to their male counterparts, to preserve their partnership's position in the public-audit firms. Collectively, these results seem sound, as the results hold unchanged after controlling for the endogeneity concerns and provide the same conclusion for a host of additional measures for both the client-firms' discretionary accruals and the LogAPW.Research limitations/implicationsEven though a lower magnitude of the client-firms' discretionary accruals corresponds to a lower-opportunistic behavior of managers, the research is limited to by which lower values of earnings management reflect a better-quality financial reporting. Given that the empirical analysis has been confined to the Swedish Corporation, the regression results might not be generalizable for other countries with different contextual features.Practical implicationsThe study might participate to the ongoing debate about the introduction of more women to the public-audit firms' elite positions (e.g. partnership) by providing evidence for the favorable female auditor effect on the quality of the client-firms' financial reporting.Originality/valueThe regression results provide a preliminary evidence on how does the presence of a FEM mitigate the inverse relation between the LogAPW and audit quality, which is an issue that has not been examined before.

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