نمایندگی هیئت مدیره زنان، نوآوری شرکت ها و عملکرد شرکت Female board representation, corporate innovation and firm performance

1. Introduction Board gender composition has gained substantial attention over the past decade in light of growing regulatory pressure on firms to address the underrepresentation of women in the boardroom. Some countries such as Norway, France, and Italy have enacted binding gender quotas, whereas others, including the UK and Spain,  
 


approach to regulation, which provides recommendations that encourage, rather than require, greater female board representation (Smith, 2014). Parallel to and reinforcing these governance reform efforts is a growing body of research examining whether corporate outcomes can be influenced by more women on boards and the potential governance mechanisms that achieve them (e.g., Adams and Ferreira, 2009; Ahern and Dittmar, 2012; Masta and Miller, 2013; Adams and Ragunathan, 2015). The critical insight from this literature is that gender differences in the boardroom matter, especially in relation to monitoring effectiveness, meaning that some firms may benefit from increased representation by female directors. In this paper, we attempt to investigate and emphasize the impact of female directors by focusing on corporate innovation. More precisely, we investigate the following questions. Does the existing evidence for the influence of women on boards extend to corporate innovation outcomes? Second, given the importance of innovation in driving economic growth, does the effect (if any) of board gender composition on innovation translate into improved corporate performance? If board gender diversity matters for innovation and performance, do firms in innovation-intensive industries benefit more from female board representation than others? Innovation is a key determinant of firm- and national-level competitiveness (see Porter, 1992, and Solow, 1957, respectively) and innovation productivity is of interest to a large number of stakeholders such as firm managers, employees, and investors (Fang, Tian and Tice, 2014). Yet, agency problems associated with innovation are likely to be severe for at least two reasons. First, risk-averse managers who are concerned about job security may reduce risky investments in innovation in favor of investments in less risky, routine projects  



Second, managers may prefer a quiet life (Bertrand and Mullainathan, 2003) and dislike the costly efforts associated with innovation projects. Therefore, monitoring has to be intensified to improve the governance of innovation.1 The extant literature suggests that female directors enhance the effectiveness of internal governance as a greater representation of women on the board is associated with more effort on monitoring (Adams and Ferreira, 2009), increased public disclosure and stock price informativeness (Gul, Srinidni and Ng, 2011), greater board independence and activism (Adams, Gray and Nowland, 2010; Perrault, 2015), and improved board deliberations of complex issues (Huse and Solberg, 2006).