This research argues that the inconclusive evidence on the board gender diversity–firm performance relationship across nations may be due to the moderating effect of national governance quality. Applying a multi-hierarchical modeling technique on a dataset containing 15,051 firm-year observations from 2931 companies in 46 countries, the results generally confirm this Hypothesis. Specifically, board gender diversity only seems to positively affect the performance of companies operating in countries with above-average levels of national governance quality. The effect of gender diversity on firm performance decreases and turns negative as national governance quality drops. The results are robust to different measures of national governance quality and firm performance, changes in methods of estimation, changes in sample structure, and tokenism.

该研究认为，关于国家董事会性别多样性与公司绩效关系的不确定性结论可能是由于国家治理质量的调节作用所致。将多层次建模技术应用于包含来自46个国家/地区的2931家公司的15051个公司年观察值的数据集，结果通常证实了这一假设。具体而言，董事会性别多元化似乎仅对在国家治理质量高于平均水平的国家中运营的公司的业绩产生积极影响。性别多样性对公司绩效的影响下降，并随着国家治理质量下降而变为负面。该结果对于国家治理质量和公司绩效的不同度量，估计方法的变化，样本结构的变化以及代币主义都具有鲁棒性。