Gender and corporate strategic choices: women in the boardroom and their impact on acquisitive behavior

The under-representation of women in many fields, especially in corporate upper echelons positions, is still an open issue nowadays. Despite the legislative efforts to reduce gender imbalance, e.g. the introduction of gender quotas on board of directors, the path towards equality is long. The aim of the thesis is to shed light on the relevance of women inclusiveness in the business field by investigating whether female proportion on boards of directors has an impact on corporate strategic choices, such as the decision to undertake an acquisition. It was conducted a negative binomial regression analysis on 250 companies in Europe that initiated at least one merger or acquisition in the decade 2009-2018. Data about the composition of the board of directors and the performance of the firms were retrieved from Bloomberg database. Results show that the coefficient of the female proportion on board of directors is statistically significant, indicating that the presence of women on boards does make a difference. Specifically, female proportion in the boardroom has a positive impact on the number of bids initiated by a firm. Moreover, by introducing an interaction term between female proportion on boards and the countries in which firms are located, it was found that this relation is statistically significant, and its sign varies across the nations considered (i.e. Belgium, France, Italy, Spain, Germany and United Kingdom).