Does Board Gender Diversity Make a Difference? New Evidence from Quantile Regression Analysis

The under-representation of female directors in the boardroom where corporate strategic decisions are made has recently become not only an ethical business case but also a public pressure to improve this gender imbalance. While there is some practical evidence to suggest that gender-diverse corporate boards have a positive impact on performance, the results from elaborate academic research are not always conclusive and vary across samples and countries. This article examines the relationship between board gender diversity and firm performance from a dynamic perspective through using quantile regression. This method allows us to capture the potential impact of female representation at different points of the distributions of the performance measure. Using a panel of French listed companies (SBF 120) over the period 2009-2011, we uncover that the impact of board gender di- versity on firm performance is not alike over different points of the conditional distribution, and that this impact depends on the measure of performance under consideration. Typically, board gender diversity affects negatively the Tobin’s Q and positively the return on asset when these variables are high and low, respectively. Finally, we show that using traditional OLS and fixed- random-effect estimations may mask the true effect of board gender diversity.