Board Composition, Board Gender Diversity and Firm Performance:Evidence from India

Abstract

Corporate governance is the burning topic of discussion all around the world amid the corporate frauds happened in the last two decades. For better corporate governance in firms, the board of directors collectively play a major role. Board composition matters a lot in the governance of the company because independent directors will not have any incentive to adhere to all the proposals of the management. Again worldwide it is also seen for the last couple of years, that board is increasingly represented by women directors. So the study has been made in that direction to find out the possible effect of board composition and gender diversity on the firm performance. Another dimension has also been studied here in this paper is to see the effect of the above two variables on firm performance in the presence of CEO duality(when CEO becomes the Chairman of the board) and in the absence of CEO duality. The study has been done taking NSE 200 companies, which represent 86% of total market capitalisation of NSE. After excluding the banking and financial companies and few companies for incomplete date the final data set is of 141 companies. A positive association has been observed in relation to firm performance.