Women Leaders and Social Performance: Evidence from Financial Cooperatives in Senegal

How do women leaders such as board members and top managers influence the social performance of organizations? This paper addresses the question by exploiting a unique database from a Senegalese network of 36 financial cooperatives. We scrutinize the loan-granting decisions, made jointly by the locally elected board and the top manager assigned by the central union of the network. Our findings are threefold. First, female-dominated boards favor social orientation. Second, female managers tend to align their strategy with local boards' preferences. Third, the central union tends to assign male managers to female-dominated boards, probably to curb the boards’ social orientation.