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With increasing environmental issue and problems, this study aims to explore how the female directors' foreign experience and corporate green commitment in emerging economics like China from 2008 to 2020.

The authors draw data of all ‘A’ share listed firms listed on Shanghai and Shenzhen stock exchanges from 2008 to 2020 from the renowned Chinese database China Stock Market and Accounting Research (CSMAR). The study's data collection start from 2008, because data about green commitment are not available on CSMAR before 2008 and final year is 2020 because data about green commitment is available at the time of data collection. After dropping observations with missing data, the study's final sample contains 20,255 firm year-observations. Finally, in accordance with prior studies, the authors classified enterprises according to the “China Securities and Regulatory Commission” (2012) to categorize firms.

The authors find that female directors' foreign experience enhances the green commitment in Chinese listed companies. In additional analysis, the authors find this relationship is more pronounced when one or more foreign directors. The study's findings are robustness to different economic techniques and alternative measure of dependent variables and endogeneity concerns. Overall, the study's findings show that female directors with foreign experience transmit environmental and sustainable knowledge and practices to Chinese companies.

First, the authors believe that this is the first study to analyze the impact of the overseas experience of female directors on corporate green commitment. Most previous studies have examined the influence of the presence of female directors or different attributes such as age, education and independence of female directors on board decisions, in order to protect the interests of multiple stakeholders (Elmagrhi et al., 2019; He and Jiang, 2019; McGuinness et al., 2017). This study finds that, in addition to other different attributes, the foreign experience of female directors also has a significant role in promoting corporate green commitment. By pushing corporate green commitment, these women directors leverage their experience in advanced economies abroad to add to the Chinese government's environmental and sustainability goal of achieving net zero carbon by 2060. As such, this is one of the first studies to highlight the experiences of female directors in transferring environmental and sustainability practices to Chinese companies. Second, the authors add to the literature by integrating two important board perspectives, such as gender diversity and the impact of foreign experience on corporate green commitment. Previous research has explored the presence or absence of female directors on board or foreign experience. However, this study adds to the literature by introducing important attributes of the influence of female directors' foreign experience on decision making. Third, this study provides evidence on the impact of foreign independent directors on the board. The authors document foreign independent directors enhance the relationship between female directors' foreign experience and corporate green commitment. The study's findings complement previous research by Liang and Renneboog (2017), showing that female directors with foreign experience transfer advanced levels of environmental and sustainable practice knowledge to Chinese companies.

This paper aims to investigate the relationship between gender diversity in CEO positions and FinTech profitability by exploring the moderating role of the average board age on such a relationship.

A unique data set of Italian FinTech companies during the 2017–2019 period was used in an ordinary least square model specification. The model is designed to assess the relationship between the presence of a female CEO and FinTech profitability and the moderating role of the average age of governing board members.

The results of this study indicate that when the average age of the FinTech firm’s board members is relatively low, the profitability of those firms with female CEOs was not significantly different from the profitability of firms with male CEOs. However, among FinTech firms with relatively older board members, the profitability of those firms with a female CEO was lower. This empirical result seems to suggest that older board directors are less prone to recognize female CEO leadership qualities. This supports the need for FinTech firms to adopt good practices in board composition that favor gender inclusion and diversity on board.

The novelty of this study within the literature is that the empirical analysis added new evidence on the relationship between Female CEO and performance by exploring the moderating role of the average age of board members. Moreover, the empirical results of this study suggest specific conditions that could improve the profitability of female-led firms by removing the apparent biased perceptions about the quality of women in leadership among older board members.

The intensity of carbon emissions has led to the serious problem of global warming, and the consequences in terms of climatic disasters are gaining increasing attention worldwide. As the energy sector is responsible for most global emissions, developing clean energy is crucial to combat climate change. This study aims to examine the relationship between corporate governance and renewable energy (RE) consumption and explore the interaction between RE production and RE use.

The study adopts an econometric framework of a panel model, followed by the robustness check using alternative methods, including logit regressions. The bivariate probit model is used to analyze the interaction between the decision to use and the decision to produce RE. The analysis is based on a sample of 3,896 firms covering 45 countries worldwide.

The results reveal that appropriate governance mechanisms positively impact RE consumption. These include the existence of a sustainability committee; environmental, social and governance-based compensation policy; financial performance-based compensation; sustainability external audit; transparency; board gender diversity; and board independence. Firms with appropriate governance mechanisms are more likely to produce and use RE than others. Finally, while RE use positively impacts firm value and environmental performance, the authors find no significant effect on current profitability.

This study goes beyond previous research by exploring the impact of multiple governance mechanisms. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is also the first study examining the relationship between RE use and firm value. Overall, the findings suggest that RE transition requires, first of all, establishing appropriate governance mechanisms within companies.

Independent directors (IDs) in India are required to qualify for the online proficiency self-assessment test to acquire or retain their position on the corporate boards. The purpose of this paper was to examine the perceived positive and negative aspects of the new mandate for the overall quality of corporate boards in India.

This study used a qualitative methodology and applied the interpretative phenomenological analysis approach. Data was collected from board members using semi-structured interviews.

This study revealed the positive and negative perceived aspects of the mandatory policy prescription of proficiency test for IDs. It was found that the participants emphasized training and mentoring programs for the IDs.

Drawing upon the actual board experiences of the participants, this study has the potential to assist policymakers in making regulations that are more effective in enhancing the quality of corporate boards. The example of action taken as well as the criticism or positive aspects pointed out can generate interest in other legislators.

The concept of proficiency test for IDs is unique to India. A review of literature did not reveal the existence of any regulatory provisions for a mandatory uniform test for examining the proficiency of IDs, in any corporate law jurisdiction apart from India.

This paper aims to appraise the effectiveness of gender quotas in breaking the glass ceiling for women on boards (WoBs) in companies that are legally obliged to comply with quotas (listed companies and state-owned companies, LP) and in those that are not (unlisted companies and nonstate-owned companies, NLNP). Furthermore, it investigates the glass cliff phenomenon, according to which women are more likely to be appointed to apical positions in underperforming companies.

A balanced panel data of the top 116 Italian companies by total assets, which are present in both 2010 and 2017, is used for estimating ANOVA tests across sectors and fixed-effects panel regression models.

WoBs significantly increased in both the LP and the NLNP companies, and this increase was greater in the financial sector. Furthermore, the relationship between the percentage of WoBs and firm performance is not linear but depends on the financial corporate health. Specifically, the situation in which a woman ascends to a leadership position in challenging circumstances where the risk of failure is high (glass cliff phenomenon) is only present in companies with the lowest performance in the sample, in other words, when negative values of Roe and negative or zero values of Roa occur together.

These findings have relevant policy implications that encourage the adoption of gender quotas even in specific top positions, such as CEO or president, as this could lead to a “double spillover effect” both vertically, that is, in other job positions, and horizontally, toward other companies not targeted by quotas. Practical interventions to support women in glass cliff positions, on the other hand, relate to the extent of supervisor mentoring and support to prevent women from leaving director roles and strengthen their chances for career advancement.

The authors explore the ability of gender quotas to break through the glass ceiling in companies that are not legally obliged to do so, and to the best of the authors’ knowledge, for the first time, the glass cliff phenomenon in the Italian context.

The empirical study aims to examine the impact of board diversity with respect to gender and nationality on firm performance in an emerging economy. This research further splits the sample into family and non-family domains and investigates the diversity–performance nexus in isolation.

The sample consists of 183 listed companies in Bangladesh over the period 2007 to 2017. This study employed the generalised method of moments (GMM) technique to address the possible endogeneity issue in the governance–performance connection. To underscore the strength of diversity, three distinctive assessment measures were used: percentage representation of females and foreign directors, the Blau index and the Shannon index.

The results for the full sample models reveal that board heterogeneity regarding both female and foreign directors positively and significantly influences firm performance as measured by return on assets (ROA). Further to this, female directors in family-owned businesses have a positive association with profitability, whereas foreign nationals demonstrate a significant positive association with performance in non-family firms. Additionally, at least three women directors are needed to make a positive difference in profitability; however, a sole director with foreign nationality is capable of demonstrating a similar impact on performance.

The findings are significant for policymakers and organisations that advocate diversity on corporate boards of directors, and the minimum number of diverse board members needs to be considered depending on the identity to bring about a significant change in organisational outcome. Therefore, the findings of this study may be applied to other emerging economies with similar institutional characteristics.

This study reinforces the existing stock of knowledge on the impact of board diversity on the profitability of firms, especially in the context of an emerging economy – Bangladesh. Irrespective of the given backdrop, this study finds that both gender and nationality diversity in the case of Bangladesh is found to have a positive and significant effect on financial performance with respect to all the diversity metrics, i.e. the proportionate number of female and foreign directors on the boards, the Blau index and the Shannon index.

The purpose of this paper is to question the profiles of female directors on top French company boards. It explores the legitimacy attributes of current female directors to identify the profiles sought recently, as firms approach the need to make many new appointments to fulfill gender quotas for supervisory boards, given that the proportion of women on a corporate board must reach 40 percent by 2017, with an intermediate level of 20 percent by 2014.

The authors gathered numerical and qualitative biographical data on all SBF 120 (French stock exchange index) firms’ female directors from annual reports and web sites over seven years (from 2003 to 2009). The authors constructed an SPSS database to categorize the individuals into various orders of legitimacy.

Drawing on director bio-data, the authors extend previous work on four legitimacy assets (family ownership; academic excellence; strong ties to the State; and top career), by adding a fifth asset (representative director), and contribute a gender dimension to the literature on personal legitimacy. Owning-family ties and academic excellence are still particularly salient in explaining legitimacy of women directors. A new source of female directors since 2005 is the pool of foreign women, outside the elite Grandes Ecoles system.

The authors had data for directors of 115 companies out of the SBF 120 firms. The authors also lacked data for seven women out of 144 appointed during the period, despite efforts to track down data from public sources.

These legitimacy profiles present different challenges for management development as those responsible for appointing several women to their boards in a short space of time will find out.

The authors highlight that with the diminishing role of family members on large corporate boards, more women directors need to be found, developed and mentored. If this approach is followed, new female directors with solid achievements can be appointed, without having their legitimacy as directors challenged by resistant males. Women will thus be able to take their legitimate place in French boardrooms and contribute their diverse experiences and knowledge.

This paper questions the legitimacy assets of female directors, which can be clustered into three groups: combined elite education and top corporate career; owning-family membership; and representative directors. These legitimacy profiles present different challenges for management development as those responsible for appointing several women to their boards in a short space of time will find out.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the association between female audit committee representation and audit fees, taking into account their demographic attributes.

Research hypotheses have been tested by performing both univariate and multivariate analyses based on a sample of 790 firm-year observations from Swedish listed firms, spanning the period 2013-2017.

Initial finding derived from the empirical analyses provides consistent evidence of a positive association between female audit committee representation and audit fees. Controlling for self-selection bias, this finding holds unchanged. Therefore, female directors are voluntarily appointed to the companies audit committees. Including demographic attributes of women directors sitting in audit committees in the audit fees, models show that increased audit fees is driven by the level of female directors’ professional experience rather than their mere representation. Results from supplementary analysis document that the positive relationship between female audit committee representation and audit fees is more pronounced when the partner in charge of the audit engagement is a female, indicating that women presence on both the demand and supply-side of audit pricing enhance audit quality more importantly than when women are present on only the demand-side position of audit fees.

This study extends beyond recently published literature on the relation between audit committee gender-diversity and audit fees by offering a novel insight on demographic attributes of female directors enabling them to demand higher quality audits, as reflected by increased audit fees.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how an environmental threat (possible quotas for female supervisory directors) might change supervisory board gender composition in SBF120 French company boards between 2008 and 2010.

From a census of supervisory board membership of SBF120 companies in France in January 2008 and December 2010, data were obtained to test hypotheses relating to changes in gender composition of boards and demographic differences between new and earlier director appointees. The authors drew on institutional theory to inform the discussion of this paper’s findings.

The authors reveal significant increases over 2008-2010 in SBF120 board female representation and significant cohort differences between recent and earlier appointees. Newer female appointees differed from male peers and from earlier appointed females and males, bringing youth and international experience. New females were more likely to gain CAC40 seats than their male peers. There was an increase in boards with multiple female directors.

Actual motivations for increase in female appointments are unknown, but institutional theory provides possible explanations, as suggestion of coercive forces loomed. Chairmen of larger firms may have made strategic choices to attract younger and English-speaking foreign women, before the rush. Limitations include the descriptive nature of the paper, but it sets a benchmark for later studies to monitor progress in depth.

The talent pool for female directors has widened to include foreign English-speaking women, bringing a range of new insights and experience of international governance practice to traditional French boardrooms. However, this could be seen as further discriminatory practice that requires female appointees to bring more human and social capital than that required of their male peers.

This is the first paper charting the changes in supervisory board composition during the three-year period of environmental unrest as quotas were proposed and legislated in France and comparing new and existing cohort French director demographics.

Purpose: The study elaborates the contextual conditions of the academic workplace in which gender, age, and nationality considerably influence the likelihood of self-categorization as being affected by workplace bullying. Furthermore, the intersectionality of these sociodemographic characteristics is examined.

Basic Design: The hypotheses underlying the study were mainly derived from the social role, social identity, and cultural distance theory, as well as from role congruity and relative deprivation theory. A survey data set of a large German research organization, the Max Planck Society, was used. A total of 3,272 cases of researchers and 2,995 cases of non-scientific employees were included in the analyses performed. For both groups of employees, binary logistic regression equations were constructed. the outcome of each equation is the estimated percentage of individuals who reported themselves as having experienced bullying at work occasionally or more frequently in the 12 months prior to the survey. The predictors are the demographic and organization-specific characteristics (hierarchical position, scientific field, administrative unit) of the respondents and selected interaction terms. Using regression equations, hypothetically relevant conditional marginal means and differences in regression parameters were calculated and compared by means of t-tests.

Results: In particular, the gender-related hypotheses of the study could be completely or conditionally verified. Accordingly, female scientific and non-scientific employees showed a higher bullying vulnerability in (almost) all contexts of the academic workplace. An increased bullying vulnerability was also found for foreign researchers. However, the patterns found here contradicted those that were hypothesized. Concerning the effect of age analyzed for non-scientific personnel, especially the age group 45–59 years showed a higher bullying probability, with the gender gap in bullying vulnerability being greatest for the youngest and oldest age groups in the sample.

Interpre4tation and Relevance: The results of the study especially support the social identity theory regarding gender. In the sample studied, women in minority positions have a higher vulnerability to bullying in their work fields, which is not the case for men. However, the influence of nationality on bullying vulnerability is more complex. The study points to the further development of cultural distance theory, whose hypotheses are only partly able to explain the results. The evidence for social role theory is primarily seen in the interaction of gender with age and hierarchical level. Accordingly, female early career researchers and young women (and women in the oldest age group) on the non-scientific staff presumably experience a masculine workplace. Thus, the results of the study contradict the role congruity theory.