Homophily versus monitoring: Do all female board directors drive the gender assignment of audit partners?

Abstract

By examining the extent to which the proportion of female board directors affects the gender assignment of engagement partners, this paper contributes to the existing literature in several ways. First, we investigate the French mandatory joint audit setting, giving rise to a set of concerns with regard to the auditor pair composition. Second, we consider female directors according to their positions on the board in order to determine which of the homophily and monitoring arguments plays the greater part in the auditor selection process. Third, we address the moderating effect of the gender quota law on the link between female directorship and the choice of audit engagement partners. Using appropriate estimation methods, we find that female board members appointed to key monitoring positions (female independent directors and female audit committee members) choose gender-diverse engagement partners. However, counter to the gender similarity (homophily) argument, we find that female inside directors are negatively associated with the selection of gender-diverse engagement partners. The association between gender-diverse boards and gender-diverse audit partners is found to be more pronounced in the period following the enactment of the gender quota law, thereby providing some practical and policy implications with regard to capitalising on the benefits of gender diversity. Supplementary analyses support the preponderance of the monitoring argument over the homophily argument in the auditor selection process.