“Gender Quotas and Company Financial Performance: A Systematic Review”, 2021-10-28 ():
Several countries have mandated sex quotas on corporate boards of directors. We systematically reviewed empirical studies that compared company profitability and financial performance before and after introducing legislated quotas. The search yielded 348 unique hits and 9 studies were retained, including 20 effects.
4 were null, 11 were negative, and 5 were positive, all of the latter for Italian and French companies.
We conclude that quotas for women on corporate boards have mainly decreased company performance and that several moderating factors must be taken into account when assessing causal effects of quotas on company performance.
…With regard to study limitations, first, the implementation of quotas is a fairly recent phenomenon, and the data therefore correspond only a relatively short follow-up period. Thus, long-term effects of gender quotas for corporate boards still await further research. Second, we included only anglophone studies, which might have excluded relevant studies written in other languages. Third, the current study presented only published research; thus, publication bias might substantially affect the results. Fourth, the heterogeneity of the multiple accounting & market-based measures to gauge company financial performance made it difficult to compare across studies and to assess which are more appropriate for the question at hand. Finally, these measures may be insufficient to capture various aspects of company performance; thus, a wide variety of objective and subjective performance measures needs to be addressed (1984; Kunze et al 201311ya; 1999; et al 2016). In doing so, the rationale for gender quotas for women on boards should not be grounded solely on companies’ future economic performance (2009; Carter et al 201014ya; 2018).