Female Directors And Female Executives On Chinese Listed Firms

As women play an increasingly important role in business management,the discussion of female managers has gradually become a research hotspot in the corporate finance field.This paper takes female managers,including female directors and female executives,as the research object and discusses the influence of firm characteristics on female representation,the mechanism of women-helping-women,and the influence of female directors and female executives on firm performance.Based on the annual firm-level data of 3097 Chinese listed firms from 2005 to 2016,this paper constructs OLS model,Fixed effects model,Logit model,Tobit model and Arellano-Bond GMM model,and draws the following conclusions:In general,the female power on the top management team of listed firms in China is constantly increasing.In 2016,the proportion of female directors in Chinese listed firms was 14.8%,and that of female executives was 16.3%,which suggests 4.5 and 4.2 percentage points higher than the 10.3% and 12.1% in 2005,the first year of the study period.However,female power is still weak compared with that of the corresponding period in most western developed countries,which indicates that China still needs effort to continuously promote the gender diversity in top management.The empirical results show that Chinese women are more likely to encounter “glass ceiling” problems in state-owned enterprises and enterprises with high risk-taking behavior or large asset,making it difficult for them to appear in the top management teams where high homogeneity is a general phenomenon,which is proved to be a disadvantage for business operations.In addition,after taking the proportion of female directors in the previous year as an independent variable and the proportion of female executives in the current year as a dependent variable,this paper finds evidence that female directors help female executives in Chinese listed firms,that is,firms with more female directors in the previous year would tend to hire more female executives in the current year.Although the so-called "trickle-up" effect has an inverse positive impact,it is weaker than the former one.So,the direction of the women-helping-women effect mainly goes from female directors to female executives.And the problem of "glass ceiling" can be partially addressed in the presence of this "women-helping-women" pattern.Specifically,for firms intending to moderate gender homogeneity in the top management team,the effect suggests that they start at the top and make more appointments of female board members.Finally,referring to previous literatures,this paper attempts to find the association between female directors and corporate performance and documents a positive association between female leaders and firm performance.Different from previous literatures,this paper additionally introduces the interaction between female directors and female executives and argues that both female directors and female executives have a negative moderating effect on each other's positive association with corporate performance.Even so,in China,where the proportion of female managers is generally low,the moderating effect is not enough to reverse the positive association between female managers and corporate performance,indicating that the partial effect of both female directors and female executives on firm performance is still positive for most firms.Again,it highlights the necessity of promoting the gender diversity in senior management in Chinese listed firms.This paper recommends that,to promote the gender diversity in top management teams,on the one hand,state-owned enterprises and large enterprises should actively follow the international step and take the initiative to play a leading role in improving equality for female training and promotion;on the other hand,it is indispensable to gather the strength of the government and relevant institutions,which can help enterprises to formulate more reasonable human resources policies,such as gender quotas,so as to bring female representation to the attention of firms and the public,and provide better guarantee for gender equality in top management.