The Influence Of Female Directors On Enterprise Innovation

As an important decision-making body within the company,the board of directors has always been regarded as the core of governance structure.Between shareholders and management,the board plays a role in connecting the two.On the one hand,the board of directors should be responsible for the shareholders,and have greater autonomy decision-making power on the premise of guaranteeing shareholders' rights;on the other hand,the board of directors has the supervisory function to the enterprise management and supervise whether the management behavior infringes the interests of the shareholders.Therefore,in the corporate governance theory,the research on the structure of the board of directors has a strong theoretical value and practical significance.The board of directors emphasizes the diversity and heterogeneity of individual characteristics of board members.The higher order theory holds that,under the premise of bounded rationality,the individual characteristics of board members will have an important impact on the business decision and performance of the enterprise.Many literatures have paid close attention to the role of individual characteristics,such as age,tenure,work experience,education background and even religious belief of board members,in the decision-making and performance of enterprises(Conyon&Mallin,1997;Daily&Dalton,2003).In recent years,as Norway,Denmark and Spain set up policy requirements to increase the proportion of female board members,the practical and theoretical circles began to discuss the importance of board members' gender in business activities.Behavioral finance studies suggest that male decision makers and female decision makers will adopt different business strategies in the context of financial decision-making.Because women are generally cautious and conservative,the risk preference in financial decision making is significantly lower than that in men,and is more likely to avoid risk(Zuckerman,1994;Wang,2005).Thus,a large number of literature from the perspective of risk aversion analysis and test of the board members' gender diversification impact on corporate performance.Some studies have found that female directors are significantly positively related to total asset return and return on investment in gender diversified boards(Erhardt et al.,2003;James,2003;Marleen,2012),and the company's excessive investment is significantly negative correlation(Jigao Zhu,2010).Therefore,it is believed that female directors contribute to the improvement of enterprise value.Other studies have found that risk aversion makes female directors significantly reduce the risk taking of firms(Faccio et al.,2015),The market gives negative comments on the appointment of female directors by companies(Farrell and Hersch,2005),Therefore,female directors have no significant positive impact on corporate value.Therefore,the conclusions about the economic consequences of gender diversification in the board of directors are far from agreement.Moreover,the existing literature mainly focuses on the analysis of the gender diversity of the board of directors,especially the proportion of female directors,and its impact on corporate performance.Scholars pay less attention to the specific mechanism of female directors' impact on firm performance.Based on this,this paper intends to analyze the economic consequences of gender diversification in the board of directors from the perspective of enterprise innovation.Specifically,the main research issues include: First,whether female directors are significantly related to enterprise innovation activities? Second,whether there is significant difference between female independent directors,female non independent directors and enterprise innovation? Third,whether there are differences between female directors and enterprise innovation activities in listed companies with different property rights? On this basis,this paper will further analyze the impact of female key position directors(including the chairman and general manager)on enterprise innovation activities.Taking the listed companies of Shanghai and Shenzhen Stock Exchange of China stock exchange of Shanghai stock exchange for 1999-2013 years as the research sample,we have carried out a more in-depth theoretical analysis and empirical test on the above problems.A shares of Listed Companies in Shanghai and Shenzhen Stock Exchange are listed as the research sample.Result finding,Firstly,the proportion of female directors in the sample enterprises is significantly negatively correlated with the level of innovation.Second,female non independent directors are negatively related to the level of enterprise innovation,but there is no significant correlation between female independent directors and the level of enterprise innovation.Third,in state-owned enterprises,the female directors are significantly negatively related to the level of enterprise innovation,while there is no significant correlation between the female directors and the level of enterprise innovation.Interestingly,further test results show that there is a significant positive correlation between the key positions of women directors(including the chairman and general manager)and the level of enterprise innovation.At the theoretical level,the conclusions of this study not only expand and deepen the research on the diversified economic consequences of the board of directors from the perspective of gender of the board members,but also provide a new interpretation of the factors influencing the innovation of enterprises from the perspective of female directors.In practice,the above test results need to be carefully interpreted.We believe that the negative correlation between the proportion of female directors and enterprise innovation does not mean that firms should not employ female directors.The test results only reflect the fact that the current female directors may have a negative impact on the enterprise innovation activities in a statistical sense.In fact,this negative effect can come from many sources.In the first place,it may really come from women's risk aversion in business decisions.Innovative activities are often characterized by high risk,high investment,long cycle,and so on.Because of the cautious and conservative nature of female directors,they tend to pursue relatively low risk projects which are more stable,and abandon high-risk innovative investment projects.Secondly,the negative correlation between female directors and enterprise innovation may not be due to the gender of directors themselves,but from the mismatch between female directors and enterprise characteristics.Kanter(1977)and Adams(2009)called this phenomenon "symbolism",That is to say,the female directors in the board of directors of many companies are not companies engaged in the essential requirements of development,but merely to meet the diversified forms of the board of directors.Based on this level,we believe that in the decision-making of directors and executives,the company should focus on the internal requirements of the development of the company to choose the employer,instead of "symbolism".