Financial analysis reveals equivalent performance between female-led and male-led US firms during the 2020-2021 market shock, suggesting no performance-based glass ceiling.
The COVID 19 pandemic precipitated an unprecedented deceleration of economic activities and a stock market crash. The unparalleled shock and the altered risk attitudes present a distinctive opportunity to examine whether the well-established concept of the "glass ceiling" is indicative of latent gender differentials in company performance. Utilizing US financial data, the study employs a range of methodologies to examine whether firms led by female CEOs exhibited the same performance as firms led by male CEOs during 2020-2021. Our empirical results confirm previous findings from the finance literature, as we neither find a systematic difference in returns to holding stock in female-led firms, nor a difference in accounting returns between female-led and male-headed firms.
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Koimisis et al. (2024) studied this question.
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