Gender diversity of corporate boards is being studied worldwide within the framework of corporate governance and financial management. Typically, the focus is on female presence on the boards. An example is the book by Aluchna and Aras (eds., 2018) entitled "Women on Corporate Boards. An International Perspective".
The purpose of this study is two-fold: (a) to survey new methodologies of quantitative analyses of gender diversity of boards vis-à-vis the firm performance and (b) to show how gender diversity of the board relates to corporate performance for a sample of 1200 European companies in 2015.
Data/ Methods
(a) A short methodological survey is conducted that includes recent works on gender diversity vis-à-vis firm performance and other variables (e.g. risk). Survey is focused solely on quantitative approaches that may be attributed to microeconometrics, such as binomial logit, binomial probit, linear regression, differences-in-differences and other approaches.
(b) Data on European companies were collected from the Amadeus database by Olesiejuk (2018). The sample contains financial data and board composition information for approximately 1200 companies from Europe in 2015, mostly from Italy, Spain, UK, Sweden, Norway and France.
The methodology applied in this research includes attempts to analyze associations between female presence on boards and the performance variables. Variables representing gender diversity of the board and those representing performance are analyzed in the framework of reverse causality.
Results/ Expected results
Preliminary results do not confirm the hypothesis that female presence on boards is associated with improvement of firm performance. This coincides with other research in the field.