How Female Executives Affect Firm Performance? A Multi-approach Perspective

Abstract

In recently years, female executives all over the world have attracted the widespread concern of many scholars, and the relationship between female executives' participation in top executive teams and firm performance is found to be considerably complicated. This paper tries to clarify this relationship by adopting a multi-approach perspective. It finds that resource dependency theory, catfish effect theory and stakeholder theory regard female executives as the facilitators of improving firm performance; feminism theory and vase theory indicate that female executives would contribute less than their male peers; upper echelon theory demonstrates a contingent effect instead of a fixed effect as considering female executives' effect on firm performance; assimilation theory argues that effect of female executives on firm performance has no difference with that of male executives; principal-agent theory, social capital theory and human capital theory all simultaneously hold contradictory views of positive effect and negative effect of female executives on firm performance; and social cognition theory argues that female executives' effect on firm performance is positive or null.