ESSAY ON GENDER AND FIRM PERFORMANCE

Women account for about half of the world’s population, and they generally face several barriers to participation in the labor force, run their business, and reach the higher echelon of their careers. Culture, religious views, and gender-related stereotypes are among the major identified constraints (Comi et al., 2019). A burgeoning literature in economics seeks to understand the effect of top managers’ or board of directors’ gender on firm performance. However, prior studies have focused on the cases of developed countries such as Italy, Norway, among others. (Comi et al., 2019; Ferreira, 2009; Flabbi et al., 2016; Kenneth and Amy, 2012). This thesis attempts to contribute to the research gap by examining the relationship between the gender of the owners or the board directors and the firm performance in two developing countries—Brazil and Malaysia. In the first chapter, I specifically focus on the role of gender in firm performance and access to credit in the case of Brazil. In the second chapter, instead, I explore the impact of gender diversification of the board of directors on firm performance in the case of Malaysia. In contrast to some studies that focus on the difference in firm performance based on the gender of owners or board directors, this study investigates multiple dimensions of firm performance. This thesis uses various firm performance metrics based on the available information in each dataset. The number of employees, total revenue, sales growth, employee growth, labor productivity, value-added per worker, and export propensity is considered for the study in case of Brazil; while total revenue, asset, profit margin, Return on Equity (ROE), and Tobin’s Q are used for the study in case of Malaysia. This thesis, therefore, provides a well-rounded and compressive analysis of the role of gender of owners or board of directors in firm performance. Further, it addresses the impact of gender diversification among the board of directors on firm performance. The majority of prior studies use cross-sectional data, making it difficult to identify causal links (Hillman et al., 2007; Julizaerma and Mohamad, 2012; Post and Byron, 2014). It also considers the influence of other factors such as age, education, and experience of board directors and investigates the existence of heterogeneous effect of gender diversification among the board of directors based on the firm size, sectors, and the status of competitiveness of the firm. Furthermore, it explores an important point that never explored in connection with gender diversification, which is the relationship between the share of directors having family relationships and firm performance. It also investigates the impact of gender diversification requirement in the Malaysian board of directors on the share of directors who have family relations.