کلیشه شدن جنسیت با موقعیت، انتصاب مدیران زن و عملکرد مالی Gender Stereotyping by Location, Female Director Appointments and Financial Performance

Introduction Women are underrepresented on corporate boards in the United States. According to a recent statistic, women hold 18.8 percent of the board seats on Fortune 1000 companies in 2016.1 This small share of female membership is startling, considering that females accounted for 50% of the collegeeducated labor force in 2016 (Bureau of Labor Statistics).2 While a number of economic and demographic factors can explain the low female representation on corporate boards, some critics have suggested that a type of gender screening is occurring. According to the U.S. Federal Glass Ceiling Commission chaired by the then-U.S. Labor Secretary Robert Reich, there exist “artificial barriers to the advancement of minorities and women in the private sector that contradict this nation’s ethic of individual worth and accountability” (p. 7).3 There is an almost universal perception that corporate boards benefit from greater diversity and that the presence of females on boards could enhance financial performance (Burke 1997).4 Clearly, one can make an ethical case that a greater social purpose is served by having more females on corporate boards as argued by the Glass Ceiling Commission and other ethics scholars (e.g., Burke 2000; Oakley 2000). However, scientific evidence for making a “business case” (i.e., female board membership enhances corporate financial performance) has not been robust, and it is often ambiguous (Adams and Ferreira 2009; Apesteguia et al. 2012; Simpson et al. 2010). The main hurdle, from an empirical standpoint, is endogeneity; that is, financial performance and female directorship (board composition) can be jointly and endogenously determined (Adams et al. 2010; Hermalin and Wesibach 2003). If so, then it is unclear whether a firm performs better because female directors are present or whether well-performing firms tend to appoint more females on their boards (Apesteguia et al. 2012). In this study, we revisit the performance–gender link, or lack thereof, from a different perspective. We examine whether gender stereotyping suppresses financial performance and whether hiring female directors improves performance. We also examine whether financial performance improvement is more (or less) pronounced when female director hiring occurs in a more prejudicial environment. Credible proxies for prejudicial environment are difficult to find. The first proxy we use is the location of the company headquarters: whether it is in a “red” state (which tends to vote for Republican candidates) or in a “blue” state (which tends to vote for Democratic candidates). From a conceptual standpoint, there is already a well-established link between sexism and political conservatism in the social psychology literature (Federico and Sidanius 2002; Jost et al. 2003). Such a link gives rise to a hypothesis that a varying degree of gender screening manifests itself as differences in directorhiring practices between red-state and blue-state companies, and also affects corporate performance. We delineate between red and blue states based on the past five presidential elections between 1996 and 2012 and the margin of votes cast for Republican versus Democratic presidential candidates.