Do women empower other women? Empirical evidence of the effect of female pervasiveness on firm risk-taking

Abstract

This study examines the relationship between female pervasiveness within the entire company and firm-risk taking. We exploit The UK Equality Act (2010), further enforced in 2017, which was made mandatory for firms operating in UK to disclose their gender pay gap. We use this measure to proxy female pervasiveness and we find it to be negatively associated with firm risk-taking. These results are robust to several tests using female participation in each pay quartile and the difference in bonus payments between men and women. Our findings provide insights into the role played by women consistent with tokenism theory predictions.