Genderized names and financial misreporting

This study examines how the gender of Chinese chief financial officers’ (CFOs)—proxied by the gender connotations of their given names, independent of their biological sex —affects corporate financial misreporting. Drawing on Chinese naming conventions, where characters carry culturally embedded gender associations rather than rigid sex-based markers, we develop a novel name “genderedness” index. Using a dataset of 26,128 firm-year observations from Chinese listed companies between 2007 and 2021, we find that CFOs with more masculine names are significantly more likely to be associated with financial misreporting than those with more feminine names, even after controlling for their biological sex. This effect is particularly pronounced among female CFOs with masculine names and remains robust after addressing endogeneity using propensity score matching. Further analysis reveals that firms with masculine-named CFOs are more vulnerable to default risk, CEO pressure, and performance-driven misreporting—especially within male-dominated governance structures. Our findings suggest that socially constructed gender roles, as reflected in naming practices, offer stronger explanatory power for financial risk-taking than biological sex. By introducing names as a novel proxy for gender roles, this study contributes to the literature on leadership and ethics.