Impact of gender diversity of firm performance

Abstract

With the growth of organizations, the importance of gender diversity has been increasing continuously. It is widely believed that the presence of gender diversity helps in improving the performance of an organization. However, the existing literature that has dealt with this topic has presented mixed results. A majority of the academic research so far has been focused on the impact of firms’ performance as a result of gender diversity at the board level (Christy Glass, 2015) (Byron, 2015) (Webb, 2004). In addition, the research has primarily covered the impact on either the financial performance of the firms or their environmental performance, but not both. This suffers from the limitation that a common data set has not been used in enough number of studies, and hence a conclusive result has not been determined for both the parameters in conjunction. In this study, we try to address this issue by analyzing the impact of gender diversity on the firms’ Corporate Social Responsibility Performance (CSRP) that encompasses three key parameters, namely, financial, social and environmental. We take a micro-level view and try to investigate the effect of gender diversity - both at the manager and employee level using a 5-year data set of 33 US-based public companies belonging to different industries.