Does Gender Diversity in the Boardroom Improve Firm Performance?

The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether increasing gender diversity on the board of directors improves firm perfomance, using a data-set of 20,487 limited companies in Sweden during 1997-2005. We use a random-effects random-coefficients model to account for unobserved firm heterogenity. More gender diversity in the boardroom is found to have a negative impact on returns on total assets after two years. Thus, legal requirements to increase gender diversity on the board of directors might carry a cost in lower profitability.