Supervisory Board Gender Diversity and Gender Quotas: Analysing the Impact on Financial Performance and Management Board Gender Diversity in Germany.

Abstract

More than ten years after the financial crisis in 2007 corporate boards are again busy navigating through turbulent times. Today, the financial market and a globalized and interconnected world are not the only challenges they need to manage. For quite some time companies have been facing additional challenges such as digitalization, demographics, new technologies and competitors, changing customer behaviour, increasing regulation, and the consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic. These external factors have led to internal challenges such as a changing corporate culture (Wissmann et al., 2016), a shift in business activities, and new job and qualification profiles (Schley, Kohl, Müller, & Kranjčec-Sang, 2017; Stange & Reich, 2015).

Moreover, there has been a substantial flux in the internal and external environment for companies throughout the last decade. The pace of the change is steadily increasing and today the Covid-19 pandemic is acting as an accelerator and “game changer”. Which is why the requirements for corporate governance are also shifting. The crucial question for companies in that respect is: How do we cope with a substantially changing environment?