Leadership Competence: Does Gender Really Matter? : A study on the operational gender diversity and its impact on financial performance and stock volatilty

Abstract: This thesis aims to take part of and contribute to the continuously ongoing debate ongender diversity, more specific about gender diversity in the operational level includingthe gender of CEO in Swedish firms across the Large cap, Mid Cap and Small Cap lists.The purpose is to analyze whether there is a statistical significance between operationalgender diversity and financial performance as well as firm volatility. The thesis uses aquantitative method with an OLS multiple regression analysis on a total of 448 Swedishlisted firms. The measures used for performance are return on assets (ROA) and return onequity (ROE), as well as volatility as a risk measure. The test variables used are femaleCEO and female executives, against the control variables females in the board, sector,market capitalization and full-time employees. The results of the thesis suggest that thereis not any significant correlation between the gender of the CEO and firm performance aswell as volatility, and there is neither any significant correlation between the genderdiversity amongst the executives and the firm performance or stock volatility.