Gender diversity in TOP management teams: indicators of company financial performance literature review

Abstract

Gender diversity in management has been a topic for the last decades. Currently, women are still not represented to a sufficient extent, however, it is already possible to observe the potential dependence of the financial performance of companies and the number of women in managerial positions. Nevertheless, this dependence is still not clearly defined. One reason may be that studies use different indicators to measure financial performance and gender diversity in management and determine the effect of gender diversity in management on these indicators. This study aims to provide an overview of the indicators used to measure financial performance in studies examining the impact of gender diversity in top management (TMT) on financial performance. Indicators are identified using a literature review of available sources. A total of 19 studies from the period 2015 to 2023 were collected for the research. These studies were obtained from the Web of Science and Scopus databases. The results of the work show that the most frequently chosen indicator for measuring financial performance is return on assets, return on total invested capital, return on equity, return on sales and return on investment. Together with these indicators, Tobin's q is also often used. The analyzed studies do not clearly determine the influence of gender diversity on most indicators.