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The current study aims at exploring the association between the representation of women in the top management and boards, audit quality and firm performance of the Saudi capital market. Moreover, it provides an analysis on whether the quality of the audit is a moderating functional that gender diversity has on the performance of the firm. The study employs a full panel data of 166 Saudi listed firms. OLS regression model with standard errors that are heteroskedastic with the assumption of robustness is estimated as a baseline estimation technique. To achieve the strong findings, additional tests are conducted on Feasible Generalized Least Squares (FGLS) and two-stage least squares (2SLS) to address the problem of heteroskedasticity and the endogeneity problems. The findings suggest a positive but not significant relationship between the representation of women in top management performance of a firm and negative but insignificant relationship between the representation of women on boards. Conversely, audit quality which is proxied by working with Big 4 audit firms has a positive and statistically significant relationship with firm performance. The moderation analysis indicates that there is no significant indirect effect of audit quality in the relationship between gender diversity and firm performance and audit quality.
Al-Matari et al. (Fri,) studied this question.