The role of female directors in family firms’ annual report´s readability

Purpose

This paper investigates the impact of board gender diversity on the readability of the annual reports of family-controlled public companies.

Design/methodology/approach

Grounded in the premises of the restricted and extended views of the socioemotional wealth (SEW) approach and executive power theory, this paper explores the ways in which family-affiliated female directors influence report readability in a sample of 133 publicly traded US companies listed in the Fortune 1,000. We use the system GMM estimator, which deals with two key sources of endogeneity by controlling first for reverse causality, using the lags of the endogenous variables as instruments, and then for omitted variables, capturing the individual effect.

Findings

Our analysis confirms that the significant enhancement in annual report readability is associated with the presence of female family directors, particularly those who are insiders within the company. In contrast, non-family female directors and family outsider directors appear to have a negative impact on annual report readability.

Originality/value

While scholars have increasingly focused on variations in annual report readability among family firms, the contribution of female directors to this phenomenon has received minimal attention. In our study, we integrate the theories of restricted and extended SEW perspectives with the theory of women’s executive power within the board. This integration is essential for considering two critical factors: firstly, the primacy of their SEW objectives, and, secondly, their legitimacy within the board.