Board gender diversity and stock price crash risk : going beyond tokenism

We empirically examine the role of board gender diversity in influencing stock price crash risk at the firm-level in twelve (12) Asia-Pacific Markets. Using a dataset comprising data from 1021 listed firms over the period 2006-2016, we employ a random effect model in a regression setting. Controlling for the firm and market-level variables, we find that board gender diversity results in lowering the stock price crash risk of the firm. Bifurcating women directors on corporate board into numerical representation (token and critical mass representation), the results support our main conjectures and suggest that the economic significance of this relationship is higher for firms that have three or more women directors on the board as compared to the firms that have less than three women directors on the corporate board. Our results are robust to alternative measures of stock price crash risk, potential endogeneity and selection biases.