The impact of gender diversity in the boardroom on dividend policy: evidence from Swedish listed companies

Abstract

In recent times, shareholders, regulators and researchers have increasingly shown concern about the gender diversity in the boardroom and dividend policy. Many researches show that women in the board can better represent the shareholders’ interest. There are different findings in the previous literature regarding the relationship between gender diversity in the boardroom and dividend policy in Sweden. This paper aims at examining the relationship between women directors in the boardroom and dividend payout, in additional, examining the components of women directors in the boardroom, that is, how the proportion of women directors, the proportion of independent women directors, the proportion of executive women directors and the proportion of institutional women directors affect dividend payout. The study analyzed the 273 companies currently listed on the Nasdaq OMX Stockholm Stock during the period 2011 and 2015. Three different two-way fixed effects models and regression analysis are used to obtain the required data. Our findings indicated that there is a positive significant relationship between the percentage of women directors, independent women directors and dividend payout in three different models. By the regression result of these three models, there is no significant relationship between the proportion of executive women directors/institutional women directors and dividend payout. Thus, our result confirms that the proportion of women directors and independent women directors in the boardroom has effect on the dividend payout. The empirical evidence on this study can support Swedish board gender quota proposal, which requires at least 40% of their board members of public traded companies are female by 2019.