Looking into Corporate Boardrooms Through the Lens of Gender Diversity: A Bibliometric Review and META Analysis

Board diversity aims to cultivate a broad spectrum of culture. In terms of age, gender, ethnic group, race, creed color, nationality, education, and experience in the boardroom to promote a diverse board with fair representation of all [1]. One of the simple and most common measure of boardroom diversity is measure in terms of gender diversity by including female representation in the boardroom [2, 3]. Diverse board brings a whole lot of benefits to the boardroom including range of outlooks in the decision making, variable suggestions in decision making problem solving [1, 4]. With the firms becoming multinational and operating in multiple countries the role of boardroom diversity has become increasingly important [5-7]. The company recognizes the need for and benefits of a diverse board to make easy and efficient decision to enhance the performance of the company [8-10].

Although the gender diversity in the boardroom has come a long way but still there is lot to be done in terms of increasing the women representation the boardroom [11-13]. It can be understood from the fact that the women representation the corporate boardroom is about only 25% in the major publicly traded companies in the European Union [12]. This gap can be attributed to the various factors such as, gender stereotype assumed by the large section of society, male domination of our society since ancient times, reluctant of women to take up the top job in the corporate, leadership style, and, to strike and balance between personal and professional life [3, 14-16].

Although there is no dearth of research in the field of corporate board diversity, there is a lack of credible bibliometric and META analysis identifying the research gap and providing the summary of the articles published in the field. Some of the most notable studies providing the bibliometric analysis of boardroom gender diversity includes [11, 12, 16-19]. None of this study provides a comprehensive overview of the literature on corporate boardroom through the gender diversity. The study provides the state of art in the field of corporate gender diversity.  The primary objective of the present study is to provide the thorough review of academic scientific literature on corporate boardroom gender diversity. More specifically, we aim to answer the following three questions.

(1) What are the prominent attributes of literature on corporate boardroom gender diversity?

(2) What are intellectual attributes of the corporate boardroom gender diversity literature

(3) What are the research gaps and future research direction in the discipline of corporate boardroom gender diversity literature?

To achieve the mentioned objective, we conduct the bibliometric analysis complemented with the META analysis by incorporating the 1413 research papers obtained from Scopus website published during the year 2000 to 2021. A bibliometric analysis has emerged as the most preferred way of literature review in recent past in finance and related academic discipline [20]. To the best of our understanding the paper is the first of its kind looking into the corporate boardrooms through the lens of gender diversity. To the best of our knowledge there is no Bibliometric and META analysis done highlighting the mentioned issue and providing the noble contribution as in our study.

The remaining chapter proceeds as follows; In the next section we provide an overview of the methodology used in the study. Section three provides the analysis of data and finding obtained. Section four provide an extensive discussion and future research direction. Finally in section five we provide the conclusion.

3.1.4 Most relevant affiliations

Table 6 shows the affiliations that published papers on corporate boardroom and gender diversity. This list is for individual organizations and not for the countries. The Dongbei University of Finance and Economics from China is ranked first and has published 43 articles. The Universiti Utara Malaysia of Malaysia contributed 36 articles to the research stream of gender diversity and corporate boardroom. The University of Southampton, England, UK is the third in the list with 26 articles. The other organizations have also contributed to the understanding and growth of this discipline of research.

3.1.5 Word dynamics

The words which are used most frequently in the publications over the years are listed and shown in Figure 6 and Table 6. The table shows the adoption of the words in the research publications between 2000-2020. In early 2000s there were hardly any use of the words like gender diversity, gender, female, leadership etc. There were very few articles in the mid-2000s using the terms of gender diversity or gender or female etc. From 2010 onwards the scholars started researching in this area, which adopted the words which are of enormous importance in the gender diversity research. It is interesting to note that the word leadership is still has not got much attention as compared to human or female or male. From the year 2018 to 2021 the word female appeared more than the word male in the gender diversity research in the context of corporate boardroom formation. The trend is upward and will grow more in the time to come.

3.2 Network analysis

Network analysis of academic literature can be referred to a set of techniques based on complex software programs that helps researchers to establish relationships and analyze the structures that formed as a result of co-occurrence of these relationship [29]. The network thus formed enables the researchers to conduct citations, co-citations, co-authorship, shared keywords, keyword occurrence etc. to establish relationship and suggest the streams for future expansion of research in a particular field [30]. For constructing the network map and visualization of data VOSviewer application is used, it is a comprehensive software package that is used for constructing and visualizing bibliometric maps [25, 26].

3.2.1 Citation analysis

Citation analysis refers to the examination of the linkage between documents to discover the underlying properties of the documents. It calculates the frequency, patterns, and graphs of citations in documents and present them in a visual network with link strengths to other documents [31]. Citation analysis of the sources is conducted (Refer Figure 3) with VOSviewer version 1.6.17. For creation of the map the minimum number of documents of source is kept at 2, and minimum number of citations of a source as 5. 172 sources out of 617 met the criteria. 

The network is made of three clusters having 2095 link and with a link strength of 6638, the first cluster – the largest one consists of 72 items and represented by red color, the second largest cluster contains 46 journals and represented by green color, the last cluster is blue colored and having 40 sources.

The first cluster has combined the journals which are publishing in the area of corporate governance and gender diversity. The prominent journals in this cluster are “Journal of Business Ethics”, “Review of Managerial Science”, “International Journal of Management”, “International Journal of Disclosure”. Few of the most influential articles published in the journal of business ethics are “Not Just a Gender Numbers Game: How Board Gender Diversity Affects Corporate Risk Disclosure” [32], “Global Insights on TMT Gender Diversity in Controversial Industries: A Legitimacy Perspective” [33], “The Effects and the Mechanisms of Board Gender Diversity: Evidence from Financial Manipulation” [34]. These studies have investigated the role of women in corporate boards by looking at corporate reporting, corporate social responsibility, sustainability programs and overall corporate performance.

The second cluster is primarily containing the journals such as “Journal of Corporate Law Studies,” “Applied Economic Letters”, “International Journal of Gender”, “Applied Economics”, “Corporate Board: Role & Duties” and “Equality, Diversity and Inclusion”. These journals are publishing articles which are focused on the theme of the role of the law and compliances to ensure the gender equality, inclusion, and diversity in corporate boards. The research on boardroom gender diversity is conducted using behavioral economic model i.e., behavioral economics of the boardroom gender diversity transaction (BGDT) to understand the transaction cost of economic framework [2]. One of the important studies is about the role of female directors on corporate boards and their impact on corporate social responsibility (CSR) is analyzed in the Chinese context and found that firm age, firm performance, corporate governance, family ownership, institutional ownership and managerial ownership are positively related to the presence of women directors [35].

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Figure 3. Citation analysis of journals publishing on gender diversity in corporate board rooms

Third and last cluster of this network is containing journals which are publishing on the core theme of the reporting of the corporate outcomes such as CSR reporting, financial reporting, sustainability reporting etc. The most contributing journals in this cluster are “Managerial Auditing Journal,” “Social Responsibility Journal”, “Pertanika Journal of Social Sciences” etc. The important studies in these journals are on the role of women in corporate board and its impact on the firm performance, most of the scholars found that there exist a positive direct [36], moderating [37] and mediating role [38] of gender diversity in auditing and reporting.

3.2.2 Co-citation analysis

It refers to the pair of papers which is cited together in a third document, it is based on the network theory framework that search and accumulate the frequency of documents which are cited together in source document [30].

Co-citation analysis of authors is conducted using VOSviewer application (refer Figure 4) for data visualization Figure 3. For better visibility of the co-citation of the authors the minimum number of citations of an author is kept at 20. Out of 48355 authors only 421 authors meet the threshold, and the network is created with four clusters having 87010 link and a link strength of 2083044.

First cluster of the network is made of 142 authors and presented with red color, the authors in this cluster has published on the importance of the role of gender diversity in corporate board room and its impact on the corporate image and performance. A cross cultural study conducted by Attah-Boakye et al. [39], to evaluate the impact of board gender diversity, national culture on corporate innovation, the authors found a positive association between innovation and corporate boardroom diversity.

The effect of board quotas on female labor market outcomes is conducted by Bertrand et al. [40], found that there is a positive association between the outcomes of the labor market and board female quota. The role of gender diversity in corporate image [41] and stock pricing [42] has also found positively associated. The role of female directors in earning management is highly correlated and result shows better performance as compared to their counterpart male directors [43].

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Figure 4. Co-citation analysis of authors publishing on gender diversity in corporate board rooms

The second largest cluster in the co-citation network is made up of 123 authors and represented by green color, this cluster is based on the research outputs of the authors engaged in the research of gender diversity from the lens of equality at workplace and pay band. Some of the important studies in this cluster are based on the role of female directors in the monitoring management [44], the earning management [43], dividend pay out strategy [45], intellectual capital efficiency [46] etc.

The third cluster contains109 authors and blue colored, this cluster is focusing on the decision aspects of the board and the impact of gender diversity in doing so. A group of scholars has carried out research studies to understand and evaluate the role of women on corporate boardroom such as credit risk [47], corporate risk taking capability [48], audit fees [49], financing decision [14] etc.

The last and fourth cluster is having forty-seven authors working in the field of gender diversity and corporate board room research, it is represented by yellow color in the network map. This cluster specifically focus on the role of gender diversity in stock pricing mechanism and risk disclosure. The scholars have determined the impact of female directorship on underpricing of stocks of a firm, does inclusion of women in the corporate boardroom influence the performance of listed stocks [50]. Few of the benchmark studies that found the positive role of the inclusion of the women in the corporate board and decision making are discussed. Research conducted by García-Sánchez et al. [10], found that there exist a positive association between women presence on board and firm performance. 

3.2.3 Co-authorship of countries

The co-authorship is a method to understand the scientific collaboration network globally, it can be conducted for authors, countries, organizations and presented by the nodes in the network [51].

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Figure 5. Co-authorship analysis of countries publishing on gender diversity in corporate board rooms

For creating the co-authorship map VOSviewer software is employed. The criteria for the country to be included in the network is kept as minimum number of documents of a country at least be two and minimum number of citations of a country must be at least 5. Only seventy-four countries got included in the network out of 110 countries.

The network thus obtained is presented in Figure 5 as a density map. The outcome of the analysis is consistent with the results of the most influential countries (refer Table 5). United States and United Kingdom is most prominent node in the network followed by China, Spain, Australia, Malaysia. These countries have been publishing in research of the gender diversity in corporate board rooms and corporate performance.

3.2.4 Keywords co-occurrences analysis

The keywords co-occurrences analysis is a technique to find the scientific knowledge structure by calculating the occurrence of a specific scientific keyword in a set of papers and presented in the form of network which is clustered together [52].

VOSviewer application is used for the creation of the network map. For better result and visibility, the minimum number of occurrences of a keyword is kept at 5, out of 3796 keywords only 292 meet the threshold criteria. The network obtained is based on three clusters having 7036 links and a link strength of 18343. The first cluster represented by red color and is made of 130 keywords, the second largest cluster is consisting of ninety-two keywords and represented by green colors, while the third cluster represented by blue color and consist of 70 keywords.

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Figure 6. Keywords co-occurrence analysis

Figure 6 depicts the network map of keywords which is distributed over three clusters, the first cluster consist of keywords such as gender diversity, corporate social responsibility, women employment, women empowerment, governance approaches etc. which are based on the core theme of gender diversity in general. This cluster shows the work that has been done in the domain of diversity and equality research for the better board combination and corporate performance. Important aspects of gender diversity research such as board size [53], women decision making [54], intellectual intelligence, board effectiveness, sustainable development [14] etc.

The second cluster is based on the keywords on gender and related aspects. The prominent keywords in this cluster are corporate board effectiveness, gender quota, board of directors, equality, gender policy, audit committee, social capital etc. The cluster depicts the research works that have been done to understand the important aspects of gender diversity in corporate board rooms and their direct impact on the corporate performance from various perspectives of it. The influence of gender diversity on the stock liquidity has been found positive if there are quite a few women directors are in the board [47]. Gender diversity have also shown positive association with environmental responsibility [14] and sustainable performance [32].

The third cluster of keyword occurrence map is made up of humanitarian aspects of gender diversity in the corporate boardroom. The most occurring keywords in this cluster are leadership, organization, middle age, adult, sex factor, gender identity, organizational culture etc. The humanitarian aspects of the gender diversity are of enormous importance in promoting the adoption of diverse gender especially women in the corporate boardroom. It has also found that women show better leadership attributes [55-57], corporate monitoring and help in improving corporate performance [3].