Women Directors In The Boardroom,the Nature Of Ultimate Owner, And Corporate Philanthropy

As women’s status has been significantly improved,"Glass ceiling" phenomenon is gradually broken.More and more women are joining in the boardroom of firms and playing important roles in decision-making. So gender diversity of the boardroom will be an inevitable trend.Extant studies show that, in comparison with male,female are different in cognitive process,thinking,values,emotional processing.Usually,We argue that women are more compassionate and benevolent than men.faced the moral problems,female are inclined to social responsibility and altruistic tendency of female is more obvious.In view of the differences compared with men,women directors in the boardroom may play their own unique and important role on corporate governance and decision-making in corporate philanthropic giving.This paper will focus on the relationship between women directors in the boardroom and corporate philanthropic giving.First,based on the relevant studies,this paper analyses the influence of women directors in the boardroom and the nature of ultimate owner on corporate philanthropic giving theoretically. Then by taking the ratio of corporate philanthropy to operating revenue as dependent variables,the existence and the ratio of women in the boardroom and the nature of ultimate owner as the explanatory variables, we select the sample data during2003-2012from Shanghai and Shenzhen A shares to investigate the influence.The results show that women directors in the boardroom have a significantly positive impact on corporate philanthropy.That is,the existence and the ratio of women directors in the boardroom are significantly positively associated with corporate philanthropic giving.And the nature of ultimate owner has remarkably negative effects on corporate philanthropy. Corporate philanthropic giving of state-owned enterprises is significantly lower than non-state-owned enterprises.Moreover,this paper also reveals that women directors in the boardroom and corporate philanthropic giving have a significantly weaker positive association for state-owned enterprises than for non-state-owned enterprises. The contributions of this study are as follows:(1)Foreign related studies argue that female have an impact on corporate philanthropic giving.To our knowledge,Chinese scholars rarely address the concern about the impact of women directors on decision-making about corporate philanthropic giving,so this paper enriches the range of corporate philanthropy and provides incremental evidence based on Chinese background,which is the motivation and innovation of this paper.(2)Using the data during2003-2012in the model, this paper can reduce the impact of contingent factors,such as catastrophic events on corporate philanthropy. Compared with the study only on the background of disaster, the result is more objective and reliable,and the conclusion has more strong stability and persuasion.