Women on Corporate Boards: Determinants and Consequences

Abstract

In early 2000’s, the epidemic of accounting scandals such as Enron, WorldCom, OneTel, and HIH has raised investors’ concerns about the effectiveness of corporate governance mechanism in all types of organizations. In Australia, being one of the most developed stock markets in the Asia-Pacific region, policy makers are unceasingly working towards the advancement of the ASX Corporate Governance Principles and Recommendations. In an attempt to improve governance mechanism, the ASX Corporate Governance Council in 2010 amended the ASX Corporate Governance Principles and Recommendations to include enhanced reporting on gender diversity on corporate boards. This study is motivated by the argument that better corporate governance can be achieved through restructuring and cleaning up the boardroom (Cheng, 2003; Park and Shin, 2003). Moreover, it has been found that women are likely to improve the monitoring mechanism of a firm (Adams and Ferreira, 2009) and enhance information environment (Gul et al., 2011) than men are. Given the importance of women on corporate boards, this study seeks to find the determinants and some consequences of women on corporate boards.