Corporate culture and board gender diversity: Evidence from textual analysis

Exploiting a distinctive measure of corporate culture based on advanced machine learning, we investigate the effect of board gender diversity on corporate culture. Our results demonstrate that greater board gender diversity considerably strengthens positive corporate culture. The findings support the notion that board gender diversity enhances board oversight and helps solve agency problems, resulting in managers being compelled to take measures that benefit shareholders and consequently, building a strong company culture. Further analysis validates the results, including propensity score matching (PSM), entropy balancing, an instrumental-variable analysis, Lewbel's (2012) heteroscedastic identification, and Oster's (2019) testing for coefficient stability. Our study is the first to link board gender diversity to corporate culture, using cutting-edge information obtained from sophisticated machine learning.