A women’s boom in the boardroom: effects on performance?

Abstract

International audienceThis article analyzes whether improving gender diversity in boardrooms improves firms' economic performance. In the context of French CAC40-listed companies between 2008 and 2012, this research uses instrumental variable panel regressions, including production frontier estimates, to arrive at two key results. First, gender diversity in boards depends on firms' attributes, including their previous gender promotion strategies. Second, promoting women in boardrooms has a significant and positive effect on economic performance, after accounting for the endogeneity of diversity. Gender diversity even reduces corporate inefficiencies and enables firms to come closer to their optimal performance

Quotas and affirmative action: Understanding group‐based outcomes and attitudes

“…The short answer to this is: Yes, they are. An abundance of studies demonstrate that quotas and other affirmative action policies are effective in increasing (a) the number of women holding political office in a variety of countries (e.g., Bonomi, Brosio, & Di Tommaso, 2013;Darhour & Dahlerup, 2013;De Paola, Scoppa, & Lombardo, 2010;Jones, 2009;Meier, 2004;Paxton, Hughes, & Painter, 2010;Tripp & Kang, 2008), (b) the proportion of women on company boards (e.g., Sabatier, 2015;Storvik & Teigen, 2010;Wang & Kelan, 2013), (c) the number of ethnic minorities in higher education (e.g., Alon & Malamud, 2014;Bowen & Bok, 1998;Crosby, Iyer, Clayton, & Downing, 2003;Fischer & Massey, 2007), and even, (d) the number of men opting to take paternity leave (Arnalds, Eydal, & Gíslason, 2013;Brandth & Kvande, 2009).…”

“…The same is of course true for the positive effects of quotas. Positive effects include fewer workforce reductions (Matsa & Miller, 2013) and enhanced firm innovation, which is likely to increase company performance in the long run, in Norway (Torchia, Calabrò, & Huse, 2011) and an increase in company performance found in France (Sabatier, 2015), where a 40% female board member quota law was passed in 2011.…”

Expanding the Notion of Dialogic Trading Zones for Impactful Research: The Case of Women on Boards Research

“…While the post-2009 WoB literature is still dominated by descriptive papers correlating women's presence on boards to financial performance indicators (e.g. Chapple and Humphrey, 2014;Haslam et al, 2010;Joecks, Pull and Vetter, 2013;Post and Byron, 2015;Sabatier, 2015;Tanaka, 2014), noteworthy developments include the extension of studies beyond Anglo-Saxon countries (Abdullah, 2014;Tipurić, Lovrinčević andŠelamov, 2015;Ujunwa, 2012) and increased interdisciplinary contributions from finance, law and governance (Bao et al, 2014;Branson, 2012;Choudhury, 2015;Gregory et al, 2013;Magnier and Rosenblum, 2014). As the WoB field becomes more global, interdisciplinary and focused on change mechanisms (e.g.…”

Corporate Governance: Mechanisms for Control and Alignment of Interests of Participants of Corporate Relations in the Transitive Economy

“…Thus, issues, such as increasing the level of control in the corporate governance system (Rubtsova, 2011;Rubtsova, 2007;Rubtsova et al, 2015), professional structure in the corporate governance system (Malinina et al, 2015;Rubtsova et al, 2015), governance specifics at non-economic organizations, based on the principles of corporate governance (Pfang, 2015), are being worked out. Topics involving the effect of trust on the corporate governance system (Spraggon and Bodolica, 2015;Kapustkina et al, 2008) or the role of a woman in such system (Bianco et al, 2015;Sabatier, 2015, Kapustkina, 2008 are quite popular now. Papers analyzing the effect of the corporate governance and corporation's activity on various aspects of people's life, and food culture in particular began to appear (Veselov, 2015).…”