Gender Diversity and Educational Attainment in Non-Listed Private Firms: Evidence from Slovakia

The paper tests the impact of gender diversity and educational attainment of owners and company directors on the performance of private firms in the Slovak economy. The paper demonstrates that in retail trade the gender diversity both in owners and company directors within a company leads to higher total factor productivity and partially lower propensity to fail. However, in other industries the companies with higher proportion of females in the ownership structure or among company directors tend to be less efficient and grow less. Although there is evidence that higher proportion of females self-select into lower risk sectors and occupations, our main results hold after controlling for it. In terms of educational attainment, the companies with higher proportions of owners or company directors with university education are more productive and grow more in terms of turnover, but there is no evidence that default of companies is related to educational attainment. We suggest that education is unique and superior resource and it generally benefits the companies by having higher proportion of educated owners and/or directors.