Gender diversity of boardrooms and firm financial performance

Abstract

The impact of boardroom diversity on firm financial performance has attracted growing research interest in recent years. However, due to the lack of readily available datasets for other parts of the world, most of the evidence is based on the US data. The purpose of this study is to examine the relationship between gender diversity in the boardrooms and firm financial performance in a region, where it has never been studied before. Using a sample of 60 firms listed in Abu Dhabi and Dubai Stock Exchanges, first the impact of gender diverse boards on the accounting value of the firms is analyzed. Afterwards, stock price reactions to the announcement of the gender quotas on corporate boards in the UAE are examined. The results do not show a significant impact of female directors on the firm’s both accounting and market value. However, these results should be interpreted carefully since the presence of women in leading positions might affect different aspects of the firm practices.

The composition of board of directors and performance: Impact of the political experience after the Tunisian revolution

“…Duality has a significant negative coefficient at the level of 1%, which implies that the combination of two functions by the CEO has a negative effect on the firms' performance (Iren, 2016;Kalsie and Shrivastay, 2016). Similarly, board size proves to be significantly negative at the level of 10% which is consistent with the studies of Carter et al (2003), Hermalin and Weisbach (2003), and Rizwan et al (2016).…”

“…The second part of this paper consists in introducing board characteristics in order to detect their influence on the existing relationship between directors' experience and firms' performance. Thus, board diversity can improve the decision making of the board and leads to better firms' performance (Iren, 2016).…”

Boards of Directors’ Characteristics and Firm Value: A Comparative Study between Egypt and USA

“…In addition, R Square is 0.0761, which means that Gender diversity explains 7.6% of the variation in the Egyptian listed firms' value. Gender diversity results supported by Levi et al [43] and Terjesen et al [45] but not supported by, Hassan and Marimuthu [46] and Iren [18]. Thus, first sub hypothesis of the fifth hypothesis that there is a with coefficient of 4.899, and the corresponding P-value is less than 0.05.…”

“…Some of those are by [9] [16] and [17]. While an excessive deal of studies has been directed on corporate governance in the developed economies [2] [3] there is relatively little focus on the developing countries [4] [5] and even less focus on countries in the Middle East [18]. Furthermore, there are little comparative studies concentrating on diverse phases of economic development context [6].…”

The impact on the governance of the gender quotas legislation: the Italian case

“…Dorrough et al (2016) investigate gender equality in relation to professions and positions in the job scenario. Iren (2016) proposes an analysis of the influence of boardroom diversity on firm's financial performance. Sutter et al (2016) study the gender difference and they show, among other issues, "We then show that policy interventions like quotas and preferential treatment help to close down the gender gap without leading to losses in efficiency, during or after a tournament.…”