Motive und Auswirkungen der neuen IPO-Richtlinie von Goldman Sachs

In early 2020, David Solomon, as CEO of investment bank Goldman Sachs, announced his institution would mandate IPOs in the U.S. and Europe only of companies that have at least one woman or one person of non-white color on their board of directors, beginning July 1, 2020. This guideline is to be tightened to at least two people by 2021, with a focus on increasing the representation of women. Our analysis questions the motives and impact of this new directive. First of all, we find that the adoption of this directive is probably primarily aimed at improving the company's own reputation. There is no stable evidence in the literature for a direct positive correlation between the gender-specific composition of the supervisory board and the financial performance of a company. A study of 386 IPOs monitored by Goldman Sachs between 2014 and May 2020 in Europe and the U.S. shows that the directive does not reflect a status quo that has already been achieved but has a major impact. 24 % of mandated companies did not have a woman on their board at the time of their IPO, and another 37 % had exactly one. Thus, 61 % of all IPOs in the study period would not have been mandated by Goldman Sachs under the gender criterion after the proposed tightening of the directive by 2021. These IPOs represent 47 % of the issue volume placed by all IPOs studied.