The impact of female directorship on firm performance: a systematic literature review

This paper presents a systematic literature review on the impact of female directorship on firm performance. We follow Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) to carry out this study. The Scopus database has been used for the identification of all the relevant documents. Several filters and manual screens have been carried out to identify a final set of 984 journal articles. We conduct a content analysis of the top 100 most influential papers ranked based on their average citations per year. The analysis covers a wide range of aspects such as research methodology, the variables and proxies used for female directorship and firm performance, main empirical findings, the sample country, the number of countries included in the sample, the sample region and the sample industry. Most of the top 100 papers (88%) have reported a positive impact on firm performance from having female directors. This study also identifies research gaps and proposes directions for future research. Our findings may have policy implications and can help regulators in devising appropriate corporate governance mechanisms with respect to female directorship.