Chief executive officer's gender and firm performance in the JSE SRI firms

Abstract

This paper evaluated the relationship between chief executive officers’ gender and firm performance. Therefore, the specific objectives of the paper were: 1) to evaluate the relationship between the CEO's gender and company turnover; 2) to assess the relationship, the CEO's gender and share price; 3) to examine the relationship between the CEO's gender and net profit. The paper applied the positivist research method, which is a quantitative approach as it sought to measure the relationship between variables. Secondary Data on CEO gender, turnover, share price and net profit were collected from the archives of integrated report of 16 JSE SRI Companies that had a complete disclosure of the research variables. The paper used the Chi-square statistics (Phi and Cramer’s V tests) to test the relationship between CEO gender, turnover, share price and net profit. Findings from the statistical results showed that the Phi and Cramer’s V test gave a P value greater than 0.05 (P>0.05), which shows that within the sample of companies, there is no significant relationship between CEO’s gender, net profit, share price and turnover. The research concludes and recommends that gender might not necessarily affect performance, at least within the sample of companies, therefore, there should be no gender discrimination on CEO’s position. Women should, therefore, receive support to assume the position of CEO. This finding provides an agenda for further research to use broader sample across industry sectors to examine this relationship further, as gender is an important component of sustainable development goals.