Female Board Representation and Corporate Performance: A Review and New Estimates for Australia1

Abstract

Despite a conventional wisdom that female board members positively impact firm performance, a thorough examination of the research to date reveals no consensus that female board members have either a positive or negative effect on firm financial performance. We build the largest dataset of Australian board appointments assembled to date. We use our data to demonstrate how difficult it is to replicate existing research, with one example from Australia and one from the USA. Using event studies and regression analyses, we demonstrate that there is little evidence that female board representation affects firm financial performance.