Nomination committee-board gender diversity nexus in Ghana

Abstract

This study assesses the link between nomination committees' presence and size as well as male directors on nomination committee and gender diversity in Ghanaian boardrooms. We use a dataset of 25 listed and 20 unlisted Ghanaian firms for January 2006 to December 2012; nine years after the Ghana Government endorsed an Affirmative Action Plan to achieve 40% representation of women on all boards by the year 2000. We employ probit and logit regressions to test our hypotheses. Listed firms and financial institutions are more likely to have more gender diverse boards. By contrast, we have no evidence to support the link between board gender diversity and board size, firm age, firm size, firm ownership, board composition and nomination committees' presence and size as well as male directors on nomination committee. Overall, our results raise questions on the appropriateness of the continual use of both the agency and resource dependency theories in explaining board gender diversity in developing economies' perspective. This study is the first of its kind, particularly within developing economies.