Gender diversity, corporate governance and firm behavior: The challenge of emotional management

Abstract

This work aims to explore the status of gender diversity in corporate governance and its implications to corporate performance and emotional intelligence. With this purpose, the role of women in leading modern corporations and the pending gaps in equality were analyzed. Tourist corporations composed the sample of firms, due to its growing economic impact in a post-global financial crisis scenario. The study sample is comprised by the 118 companies listed at the STOXX® Global 3000 Travel & Leisure. Financial and corporate governance data provided by Reuters.com, were used for the period ending 2017. Additional data on corporate governance of each entity were gathered from official corporate website of each firm. We designed ad hoc indicators for gender diversity, along with differences in salary and seniority. Special attention was paid to the specific position held by women in each board, and its relationship to emotional intelligence, as a first step to a full research agenda. The results suggested very relevant gap in the three analyzed dimensions: presence, salary and seniority. Women tend to be focused only on several corporate tasks like those related to marketing and human resources management. This bias, which in a first view can be considered an additional manifestation of gender gap, is at the same time an opportunity to link modern corporations to a new style of management in which approaches like emotional intelligence could play a most prominent role. This research contributes in two different ways: (1) it demonstrate the enormous gap still existing between men and women at the top of tourist organizations worldwide and (2) it suggests several research pathways given the type of gender gap detected. Keywords: Corporate governance, Gender diversity, Emotional intelligence, Corporate performance, JEL classification: D8, R5, Z1, Z3