dc.description.abstract | In the modern 21st Centuries, gender equality is still a popular issue among Corporate Governance study as most women found themselves facing countless obstacles to reach the highest position due to their gender. Simply look at the heart of the corporate governance system, corporate board. According to Credit Suisse (2014) study, the highest percentage of female board directors in 43 countries is Norway with only 39.7%, not even half of it should be. More and more study addresses this issue as a glass-ceiling or glass-cliff to explain why does a woman have a hard time to reach the top position in their career. Since most of the board gender diversity studies were conducted in the western countries, we would like to apply this notion into our Taiwanese local enterprise to understand how do Taiwanese investors feel about a female director.
All the data in this study were collected from the Taiwan Economic Journal (TEJ) data bank, which included all the listed and over-the-counter firms in Taiwan from
the year 2008 to 2017. The final samples included 1250 firms in 22 industries with 10 years of data each. We have organized a moderated mediation model to observe
the correlation among board gender diversity, corporate performance (ROA & Tobin’s Q), ownership structure and power of female structure. The multiple regression analysis was used in this study and the results show that board gender diversity has a significant positive effect on ROA while board gender diversity has a non significant negative effect on Tobin′s Q. This implies that even though the gender diversity in the boardroom has a positive effect on the overall corporate performance, but due to the individual investor’s bias against women, the corporate stock market performance will lower the entire performance. On the other hand, the female chairperson has a non-significant reinforcement on the individual investors’ behavior. That is, the stock market is not comfortable to accept a female leader in a corporate boardroom, but the reinforcement effect is not as strong as we thought it would be. Furthermore, the female director who doesn’t come from a controlling family has a significant positive reinforcement on the individual investors’ behavior, which implies that individual investors will trust the man behind the controlling family, so if a female director that does not support by the controlling family will increase the individual investors’ bias against women. | en_US |