Essays on the influence of female representation on the top management team on firms’ marketing strategy in the digital age

The top management team (TMT) is the small group of executives that decides on the vision for the firm, charts strategic direction, and sets the tone for the entire culture of the organization. Over the last few decades, female representation on the TMTs has grown from virtual non-existence to roughly one in four executives being a woman (Catalyst 2017). It is well established that, in the general populace, women tend to have different cognitive bases and value systems compared to men, but far less research has been conducted to see how these differences might influence female leadership in the TMT and impact firm-level decisions and strategies. Scholars in other disciplines have started to investigate this emergent phenomenon and find evidence that the inclusion of women on the TMT affects strategy and performance in other business domains, but we currently know nothing about its effect in the field of marketing. In this dissertation, I investigate how female representation in the TMT influences firms’ marketing strategies in both long- and short-term decision contexts. Specifically, in the first essay I use a longitudinal analysis of 218 publicly traded U.S. Fortune 500 firms from 2007 to 2013 to find that a relative increase in female representation on the TMT is positively associated with marketing strategies that build and leverage customer relationships: likelihood of CMO presence in the TMT, strategic emphasis (relative emphasis on value appropriation versus value creation), and corporate social responsibility (CSR). I also find evidence that strategic emphasis and CSR mediate the positive relationship between female representation on the TMT and firm performance. In my second essay, I examine 69 social media firestorm events at Fortune 100 firms engaging with consumers in the digital age to demonstrate that female representation on the TMT is positively associated with a higher rate of response to firestorms. However, for firestorms in which the negative sentiment is high, male-dominated TMTs actually move faster to address the issue. In an era in which managers, investors and society are facing a growing push for gender equality in business and leadership, I provide insight into how greater female representation on the TMT may impact firms.Marketin