Gender-diverse audit partners and audit fee premium: The case of mandatory joint audit

This study empirically investigates the impact of auditor gender on audit fees in a unique audit regulatory environment, namely France, where joint audit is mandatory by law. Apart from the fact that male and female auditor engagement partners have distinctive behaviors and style, the question also arises at to whether coordination problems between two competing audit firms are exacerbated or mitigated by the presence of a female auditor in the joint auditor pair composition. This issue could be more challenging in the context of International Financial Reporting Standards adoption, which increases audit task complexity, audit risk, and audit effort required for an audit engagement. Using a matched sample of firms from the CAC All-Shares Index listed on Euronext Paris from 2002 to 2010, we find that, when a female auditor is paired with a male auditor, the difference in audit fees stems not only from the presence of the female auditor partner but also from male–female interaction within the joint auditor pair composition. In a supplementary analysis, we show that the impact on audit fees of both the presence of a female partner and male–female auditor interaction is dependent, but in a different way, on the number of Big 4 audit firms in the auditor pair composition.