Board Gender Diversity: Evidence From Indonesia

Abstract

Board gender diversity continues to gain global attention, alongside a growing percentage of female board members in public companies. While board gender quotas have played a role in this increase, countries without such mandates have also experienced similar growth. This raises an important question: What drives companies to appoint women to corporate boards in the absence of compulsory regulations? Primarily, this paper examines the relationship between foreign institutional investors and female board members in supervisory and management boards within Indonesian public firms. This study analyzes data from 147 companies between 2019 and 2022 using OLS regression with lead and control variables. In contrast to the belief, the findings show that foreign institutional investors have a relatively low to no influence in shaping board gender diversity on each board. This lack of influence suggests that other factors may significantly affect companies’ decisions to hire women on boards, highlighting the necessity to investigate these additional factors.

Keywords: board gender diversity; corporate boards; foreign investors