Non-financial disclosure and women on board: Is a mandatory approach on gender quotas effective to increase communication quality?

Abstract

The present study investigates the effects of women on companies' boards on the quality of non-financial information, and the influence that a mandatory ap-proach has on this relationship. Previous studies have dealt with analysing the ef-fects of female presence on CSR or ESG information, but few pieces of research have taken into account other strands of non-financial information and have re-sorted to an index to measure its quality. Therefore, this study aims to contribute by extending the analysis to any type of non-financial information communicated by a company. Moreover, the present research contributes to the strand of litera-ture investigating the role of women on companies' boards. In fact, the results of the OLS regression analysis demonstrated that the presence of women with an ex-ecutive role positively influences the quality of disclosure in Italy, and this rela-tionship is not influenced by the advanced stage of application of the regulation on gender quotas. Moreover, disclosure quality is significantly higher for firms that disclose a non-financial statement. Nevertheless, the study suffers from some limi-tations with respect to the sample size and the analysis of the trend in reporting af-ter the introduction of Directive 2014/95/EU.