THE GENDER CONTRIBUTION TO THE CORPORATE GOVERNANCE AND THE CORPORATE PERFORMANCE (LESSONS FROM THE E.U.)

We investigate whether gender can be considered as part of the corporate governance structure, and accordingly its real impact on corporate performance. Based on our analysis of 21,382 European companies and 2,159 ones in the UK, we focus on the impact of mandatory female percentages, (pink-quotas), based on the proposed EU-Directive, which aims to push female representation toward their natural percentage of the home population. We find that gender explains differences among the corporate governance solutions as adopted at national level. This fact holds regardless of whether the specific country has already adopted any regulation in accordance with the EU proposal. In fact, governance choices are more rooted into the country culture, although the single national governance schemes differentiate whether the managerial roles are mainly covered by females or males. The EU-Directive appears to be unable to reduce the gaps between the schemes of governance adopted across the EU, as there is no economic incentive to do. Indeed, gender and governance do contribute to capital intensity of EU-Companies and their funding, only, as suggested by previous literature but has no impact on corporate ROI or its persistence. Surprisingly far from it, we find out that female gender attracts more equity capital, regardless of the operating risk level. However, there is evidence that in the unregulated UK market, gender does influence ROI.