Does Board Gender Diversity Improve the Performance of French Listed Firms?

International audiencePrevious studies have found inconclusive results regarding the effects of board gender diversity on firm financial performance. This paper tackles this issue in the context of the French listed firms over the 2009-2011 period. Our results show evidence of a negative and significant effect of the percentage of female directors on financial firm performance. This suggests that adding more women in an indiscriminate fashion to boards of directors may be counter-productive and leads to lower firm performance. The effect on firm performance is, however, insignificant when the presence of women on corporate boards is measured using a dummy variable. We also document that accounting for the endogeneity issue is crucial to assess the nature of the relation between the variables under consideration