In this article, we examine the current state of the research on firm performance and the gender diversity of firms' boards of directors. First, we present and analyze descriptive statistics for 13,000 board seats of the Standard and Poor's (S&P) 1500 companies for the years 2003-2007. Next, we...

We investigate the effect of the community values surrounding a firm’s headquarters on the percentage of women on a firm’s board of directors. We use social capital, religiosity, and political affiliation measures to capture the values associated with the community norms. We find that firms...