Research On Participation Degree Of Female Directors

As one of the important function organs of corporate governance,board of directors is the core of corporate governance structure.Normative and empirical analysis shows that the characteristics of board can influence their functions,and influence corporate governance.Gender structure of board,as one important respect of board characteristics,has some effects on corporate governance.Through reading the annual reports of listed companies,the author found that the participation degree of female directors is not ideal as a whole,and that some companies even have no female directors,but that some companies whose participation degree of female directors are satisfactory.After researching the annual reports of those companies which have women directors,the author found that some female directors are chairman or vice chairman of board,or take some important posts,such as president,vice president,chief financial officer,etc.,or at the same time serve as chairman of board and president.In response to this situation,the author creatively put forward the concept of "participation degree of female directors",and through theoretical analysis,created the index of "participation degree of female directors".The article mainly concerned the two dimensions of "quantity" and "quality" to quantify the index of "participation degree of female directors".The sub-indexes of "quantity" included "the proportion of female directors "and" the proportion of female independent directors".The sub-indexes of "quality" are derived from the statistics,analysis and judgement of the phenomena that some female directors are the chairman or vice chairman of board,or both chairman of board and president,and other important posts.They are following six sub-indexes:"whether the company exists that one female director is also chairman of board","whether the company exists that one female director hold the post of president at the same time","whether the company exists that one female director hold the post of chief financial officer at the same time","whether the company exists that one female director is both chairman of board and president","whether the company exists that one female director is vice chairman of board","whether the company exists that one female director is vice president"."Participation degree of female directors" is obtained through adding to above eight sub-indexes by weight.The author adopted the questionnaire to seek expert advice over the order of importance on the eight sub-indexes,used the basic procedures of Analytic Hierarchy Process,that is setting up the contrast matrix of the eight sub-indexes,and finally simplified the matrix to obtain the wight assignation.In the paper,the samples are Shanghai Stock Exchange's A-share 828 listed companies in 2009.These companies' data are complete after excluding the companies whose either financial performance data or the data on profitability of shareholders are incomplete.The paper achieved empirical results through basic statistical analysis,linear regression analysis and Pearson Correlation coefficients by software 14.0.The detailed data of board are obtained by hand,through reading annual reports of listed companies one by one,and then after counting,collecting,analysing,arranging.The data of both financial performance and the profitability of shareholders are from the CSMAR database.The results showed that the participation degree of female directors of listed companies is relatively satisfactory as a whole,and over half of sample companies have female directors,the best of participation degree of female directors is 0.6512.The article found that industry, independent directors scale and whether the chairman is also president are significant influencing factors of participation degree of female directors.Correlation coefficient analysis showed that between participation degree of female directors and corporate performance indexes were significant positive correlation.The paper found no significant correlation between participation degree of female directors and the market indexes such as the profitability of shareholders.