Women in the Boardroom and Their Impact on Governance and Performance

Although some argue that tokenism drives the selection of female directors, we show that they have a significant impact on measures of board effectiveness. In a large panel of data on publicly-traded firms from 1996-2003, we find that (1) the likelihood that a female director has attendance problems is 0.29 lower than for a male director, (2) male directors have fewer attendance problems the greater the fraction of female directors on the board, (3) firms with more diverse boards provide their directors with more payperformance incentives, and (4) firms with more diverse boards have more board meetings. We also show that the positive relationship between corporate performance measures and gender diversity documented by previous studies is not robust to attempts to address the endogeneity of diversity. Instead, the average effect of gender diversity on both market valuation and operating performance appears to be negative. This negative effect is driven by companies with greater shareholder rights. In firms with weaker shareholder rights, gender diversity has positive effects. Our results suggest that diverse boards are tougher monitors. Nevertheless, mandating gender quotas in the boardroom may not increase board effectiveness on average, but may reduce it for well-governed firms where additional monitoring is counterproductive.