Abstract:

  This paper analyzes the impact of number of women on the board of directors in Turkey on the performance of firms. The data covers the period between 2008-2015 for the BIST-100 companies and analyze the impact of number of women in the boards to the performance of companies proxied by return on assets, return on equity and Tobin’s Q ratios. The percentage of women in the board and the percentage of women among the independent board members and the size of the board are also scrutinized. Further, other factors which would affect the performance like firm size and debt ratio are also included in the analysis. The paper adopts a panel regression model which considers the industrial differences by assigning dummy variables for each sector. The results of the study show that the increases in the percentage of women in the boards decreases return on assets and return on equity but increases Tobin’s Q. On the other hand, the percentage of women in the independent directors decrease Tobin’s Q.

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