2015/06/18 by Jan Luca Pletzer, Romina Nikolova, Karina Karolina Kedzior +1 · 1 citation
Business, Management and Accounting · Medicine · Social Sciences · #Accounting #Business #Confidence interval #Corporate Finance and Governance #Corporate governance #Demographic economics #Demography #Developing country #Economic growth #Economics #Finance #Gender Diversity and Inequality #Gender Politics and Representation #Internal medicine #Medicine #Meta-analysis #Political science #Random effects model #Representation (politics) #Sociology
paper · pdf · doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0130005
openalex publication_date 2015/06/18 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
In recent years, there has been an ongoing, worldwide debate about the representation of females in companies. Our study aimed to meta-analytically investigate the controversial relationship between female representation on corporate boards and firm financial performance. Following a systematic literature search, data from 20 studies on 3097 companies published in peer-reviewed academic journals were included in the meta-analysis. On average, the boards consisted of eight members and female participation was low (mean 14%) in all studies. Half of the 20 studies were based on data from developing countries and 62% from higher income countries. According to the random-effects model, the overall mean weighted correlation between percentage of females on corporate boards and firm performance was small and non-significant (r = .01, 95% confidence interval: -.04, .07). Similar small effect sizes were observed when comparing studies based on developing vs. developed countries and higher vs. lower income countries. The mean board size was not related to the effect sizes in studies. These results indicate that the mere representation of females on corporate boards is not related to firm financial performance if other factors are not considered. We conclude our study with a discussion of its implications and limitations.