The gender equality paradox in Swedish listed firms: are Swedish listed firms' financial performances affected by the ratio of women and men in leading positions?

Sammanfattning: This dissertation aims to investigate the Swedish private sector, with focus on the share of women in leading positions, and its effect on firms’ financial stability in terms of stock return volatility. This thesis is based on AllBright’s three lists from 2018 which rank Swedish listed firms after their level of gender equality within the companies’ top management. With respect to the six-sigma theory, three new lists have been created which take into account which type of top management constellation the company has implemented for at least three years in a row. From the empirical results, one can conclude that the share of women on the board of directors (WBD), and the share of women employed (WE) have had a negative effect on stock return volatility during the time period 2008 – 2016 in companies that have implemented an equal gender distribution in their top management for at least three years in a row. The opposite could be confirmed for firms that have implemented an unequal gender distribution within their top management for at least three years in a row. Since AllBright was founded 2011, information about the firms’ duration on each list was gathered between 2011 – 2018, where the most recent three-year list-placement was used. The panel data set included fixed effects of firm-level, industry, time, robust standard errors, and accounting measures as control variables. Information about these variables was mainly gathered from Retriever, Orbis, Yahoo Finance, and the companies’ annual reports. The final sample consisted of 136 companies corresponding to 1224 observations.