The impact of board diversity on firm performance – The case of Germany

Abstract

In 2006 German Chancellor Angela Merkel became the patron of Germany’s Diversity Charter (“Charta der Vielfalt”), a company initiative promoting diversity in firms. Yet numerous firms have voluntarily signed the charter, affirming their compliance to diversity reinforcement and encouragement. The German Corporate Governance Code (GCGC), a soft-law regulation aiming to foster good corporate governance, especially for listed companies, also included the subject of diversity since 2009 (GCGC, 2009). In fact, during the last few years the concept of diversity has increasingly gained in popularity (Díaz-Fernández, GonzálezRodríguez, & Simonetti, 2020), and has simultaneously remained a topic of public discourse ever since (Naciti, 2019). Consider the following four examples that reflect the increasing importance of diversity: first, Germany pursued a controversial debate about the introduction of fixed quotas for women on corporations’ supervisory boards (Bschorr & Lorenz, 2013, pp. 34–35), an attempt to increase diversity among the gender. Second, caused by demographic change and affected by a raised retirement age — retirement age is to be increased gradually from 65 to 67 years by 2023 — a growing number of older age group German employees will Abstract