Open AccessOwnership structure and women on boards of directors of Canadian listed companies
Author(s) -
Tania Morris,
Amos Sodjahin,
Hamadou Boubacar
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
corporate ownership and control
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 1810-0368
pISSN - 1727-9232
DOI - 10.22495/cocv18i3art10
Subject(s) - accounting , business , corporate governance , shareholder , endogeneity , gender diversity , audit committee , audit , diversity (politics) , finance , economics , political science , law , econometrics
This study examines how the structure of shareholder ownership (i.e., management, external blockholders, and board ownership) affects the presence of women on boards of directors. The results of an analysis of a sample of listed Canadian companies for the period 2007-2015, controlling for endogeneity, indicate that the proportion of women sitting on a firm’s board of directors is influenced by its shareholding structure, thus, supporting the view that the two governance mechanisms of gender diversity and shareholder structure can substitute for each other. The results also show that there is a curvilinear relationship between a company’s ownership structure and the proportion of women on its board of directors and audit committee. Indeed, findings show that as the concentration of company ownership increases, the proportion of women on boards of directors decreases to a threshold, following which we observe an increase in the proportion of women sitting on boards of directors and particularly on audit committees