Gender and Firm Performance in Africa: Does the Business Environment Play

Following the empirical literature on the moderating factors in the relationship between firm performance and gender of the manager, this paper contributes to the empirical literature by investigating whether the business environment plays an instrumental role in the relationship between gender of the manager and firm performance. [...] Firm characteristics used in the study include: size, measured by the number of (permanent full-time) employees; age, the difference between the year of the survey and the year the firm commenced operations in logarithms (to abate the risk of extreme values biasing regression results); and managerial experience, the number of years a firm’s manager has spent in that line of operation. [...] To explore the effect of business environment (BE) indicators in the relationship between gender of manager and performance, we also estimate the following equation: (2) 11 12 ReseaRch PaPeR 539 where is a vector of coefficients that indicates the moderating effect of the BE in the relationship between the gender of the top manager and firm performance, and is a vector of coefficients for firm-spe. [...] We also explore whether the share of female workers (Fem) affects the relationship between gender of manager and firm performance by including an interaction term: (3) where is a vector of coefficients that indicates the effect of the proportion of female workers in the relationship between gender of the manager and firm performance. [...] Moderating role of female share of employees and business environment Following Flabbi et al (2019), we first explore the moderating role of the proportion of female workers in the workforce in the relationship between gender of the manager and firm performance.