Gender diversity and sustainability responsiveness: evidence from Nigerian fixed money deposit banks

Humans are considered to be different from each other with their acumen and intelligence. The working condition in IT sector has changed over the past few decades. There has been a drastic increase in the number of female employees towards the development of IT sector over the past few years. Gender diversity is creating a wide range of awareness and helps understand the importance of gender identity. IT industry which is a dominant industry in India has reckoned gender diversity as a major tool to ensure it stands on criteria of being competent and innovative in the ever changing dynamic business environment. The main objective of this paper is to analyze the relationship between acceptance of gender diversity among the employees, diversity practices and programs adopted by the IT industries and barriers to the same.

This study aims to examine the impact of the characteristics of the board of directors (BOD), namely board independence, board size, frequency of board meetings, and board gender diversity, on firm performance. This quantitative study uses data from all firms listed in the Bahrain Bourse for 2019 and 2020. Data on BODs were taken from the companies’ governance reports, while data on firm performance, namely return on assets (ROA), return on equity (ROE), and earnings per share (EPS), were taken from annual reports. Based on the ordinary least squares (OLS) approach, the results show insignificant relationships between BOD characteristics and firm performance. Board independence, size, frequency of meetings, and gender diversity insignificantly enhance Bahraini firms’ performance. The results indicate that firms may need to effectively implement BOD mechanisms. Moreover, other factors may moderate the impact of BOD mechanisms on firm performance. Hence, the study suggests a need for more regulations and policies to increase the effectiveness of board members. This study alerts policymakers, firms’ shareholders and stakeholders, and researchers to the need to increase directors’ roles in boosting company performance, especially in developing countries, where it is complicated to force business to follow best governance practices.

To verify if female directors on the bank’s board play a role in managing bank stability, this paper applies a multi-threshold model to quarterly data from 26 Taiwanese commercial banks over the 2002–2018 period to find the factors that influence bank financial stability and to examine how female board directorship affects it. The empirical results suggest that women on the board do play a guarding role in a bank’s financial soundness when banks reach a high debt ratio regime. The influence of female directors on the capital adequacy ratio is positive for banks with a debt ratio higher than 92.69%, and for non-performing loans it is positive within the regime of the debt ratio 90.71% ≤ τ < 95.39%.
In particular, it has been found that the value of total assets is a factor that positively affects a bank’s financial soundness, which supports the “too big to fail” theory for banks with high total assets and debt ratios. Revenue has the opposite effect on financial soundness when it negatively affects the capital adequacy ratio and positively affects non-performing loans. A larger board size reduces banks’ financial soundness, which is contrary to the higher proportion of women on the board of directors, which generally contributes to the financial stability of the bank.