The effectiveness of female chief financial officers in managing working capital: Evidence from US-listed firms

This paper examines how female Chief Financial Officers (CFOs) influence working capital management in U.S. public firms, documenting that female CFOs are associated with significantly lower working capital days compared to their male counterparts. Our analysis reveals several important conditions that enhance female CFOs’ effectiveness. We find that their effectiveness strengthens with greater board gender diversity, diverse international representation, and formal business education, suggesting complementary effects between female executive leadership and board composition. The effectiveness of female CFOs is more pronounced in firms with higher compensation levels and in environments characterized by lower market concentration, higher competitive threats, and broader firm scope. These effects are further amplified under stronger network connectivity, higher managerial ability, and co-opted boards, but independent of the specific committee or board roles held. Our findings remain robust to multiple endogeneity tests, including system GMM estimation, propensity score matching, entropy balancing, copula approaches. Our study contributes to the literature on gender in corporate finance by identifying working capital management as an important channel through which female executives enhance operational efficiency, while also highlighting the organizational and market conditions that amplify their effectiveness. Offering a business case for maintaining and strengthening diversity initiatives even in the face of social anti-activism pressures.