Gender and firm performance around the world: The roles of finance, technology and labor

Lee Allison, Yu Liu, Samuele Murtinu and Zuobao Wei

Journal of Business Research, 2023, vol. 154, issue C

Abstract: We study the effect of having a female top manager (FTM) on firm performance using World Bank Enterprise Survey data that cover 130,000 firms in 130 mostly developing countries from 2008 to 2017. We show that firms with FTMs underperform their male-led counterparts. FTMs’ underperformance is largely driven by small and medium-sized enterprises and varies widely across world regions. FTMs influence firm performance through affecting firms’ three critical factors of production, which are finance, technology, and labor. Our mediation analyses indicate that the negative FTM–performance relation can be partially mediated by firms’ access to finance, technology usage, and labor selection, which are proxied by lines of credit, internet purchases, and labor cost, correspondingly. This study synthesizes the leadership literature, extends upper echelon and social role theories, and brings clarity to the equivocal findings in the literature on the relation between female leadership and firm performance.

Keywords: Gender; Performance; Finance; Technology; Labor (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D22 G30 J16 L25 M21 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0148296322007779
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:jbrese:v:154:y:2023:i:c:s0148296322007779

DOI: 10.1016/j.jbusres.2022.113322

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Business Research is currently edited by A. G. Woodside

More articles in Journal of Business Research from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().