This paper argues that role modeling can explain the impact of boardroom gender diversity on corporate performance. It theorizes that female workers are boosted by female leadership, gain increased motivation, and achieve greater productivity, thereby making their female directors more effective. We test this bottom–up approach to the trickle-down hypothesis on data hand-collected among local cooperatives providing microcredit in Senegal. All the organizations surveyed are similar and small, which allows us to use a homogenous performance metric. All of them outsource their human resource management to the same third party, which mitigates the risk of endogeneity. The data cover over 100,000 triads composed of gender dominance on the board, gender of CEO, and gender of credit officer. A better financial performance is achieved when the triad is gender-uniform—be it male or female—confirming the importance of role modeling and suggesting that the performance of female board members depends on the gender composition of the workforce.

Plain English summary Women’s leadership styles differ from men’s. But we still ignore whether the styles adopted by male and female directors make any difference in terms of financial performance. Scholars hold controversial views about whether and how the financial performance of firms depends on gender diversity in the boardroom. This article speculates that female directors act as role models on their subordinates (“trickle-down effect”) and their impact is “bottom–up” in the sense that female workers gain increased motivation when working under female leadership. We hand-collected data from financial cooperatives in Senegal. These organizations enabled us to observe the unlikely situation of boards including over 50% of women. We measured financial performance with loan repayment. Our results confirm that female-dominated boards achieve a better financial performance when they work with female CEOs and female subordinates. The principal implication is that the performance of female board members depends on the gender composition of the workforce.

本文认为，角色建模可以解释董事会性别多样性对公司绩效的影响。从理论上讲，女性领导力可以提高女性工人的积极性，增强她们的动力，并提高生产力，从而使她们的女性导演更有效率。我们使用这种自下而上的方法对在塞内加尔提供小额信贷的地方合作社之间手工收集的数据的逐滴假设进行了检验。所有接受调查的组织都是相似且规模较小的，这使我们可以使用同质的绩效指标。他们所有人都将其人力资源管理外包给同一第三方，从而降低了内生性的风险。数据涵盖了100,000多个三合会，其中包括董事会中的性别优势，CEO的性别和信贷员的性别。

普通英语摘要妇女的领导风格与男子的领导风格不同。但是，我们仍然忽略了男性和女性董事采用的风格对财务业绩是否有任何影响。关于公司的财务绩效是否以及如何取决于董事会中的性别多样性，学者们存在争议。本文推测，女董事是下属的榜样（“ tri滴效应”），其影响是“自下而上”的，即在女性领导下工作时，女职工会获得更大的动力。我们从塞内加尔的金融合作社手工收集数据。这些组织使我们能够观察到董事会中不太可能出现的情况，其中包括50％以上的女性。我们用还贷来衡量财务绩效。我们的结果证实，与女性首席执行官和女性下属合作时，女性主导的董事会可以实现更好的财务绩效。主要含义是女性董事会成员的表现取决于员工的性别组成。