This study examines whether and how female directors enhance innovation performance. Based on a sample of U.S. firms, this study shows that firms with more female directors on boards present a more pronounced positive association between R&D and future firm performance (measured by earnings and operating cash flow), suggesting a positive impact of female directors on R&D performance. We also examine how female directors affect two intermediate R&D performance indicators, namely innovation output and productivity. Our results show that a higher number of female directors are associated with higher innovation output (measured by the sensitivity of patents and patent citations to R&D) and higher R&D productivity (measured by the sensitivity of future sales to R&D). In the further analysis, we trace the committee that each female director sits on and find that the better R&D outcomes brought by female directors are mainly driven by their monitoring rather than advisory role. Additionally, female directors enhance the R&D outcomes by attending more board meetings.

这项研究探讨了女导演是否以及如何提高创新绩效。根据美国公司的样本，该研究表明，董事会中女董事人数更多的公司在研发与未来公司绩效之间存在更为显着的正相关性（通过收益和经营现金流来衡量），这表明女董事对研发具有积极影响表现。我们还研究了女性主管如何影响两个中间R＆D绩效指标，即创新产出和生产率。我们的结果表明，更多的女性董事与更高的创新产出（通过专利和专利引用对研发的敏感性来衡量）和更高的研发生产率（通过未来销售对研发的敏感性来衡量）相关。在进一步分析中，我们追踪了每位女董事所在的委员会，发现女董事带来的更好的研发成果主要是由她们的监督而不是咨询作用所驱动的。此外，女性董事可以通过参加更多的董事会会议来提高研发成果。