| Abstract: |
How do women leaders such as board members and top managers influence the
social performance of organizations? This paper addresses the issue by
exploiting a unique database released by a Senegalese network of 36 financial
cooperatives sharing identical governance characteristics and placed under the
authority of a central union. We scrutinize the loan-granting decisions, made
jointly by the locally elected board and the delegated top manager, whose
career is supervised by the central union. Our findings are threefold. First,
female-dominated boards favor social orientation in loan-granting. Second,
female top managers are not necessarily more socially oriented than their male
colleagues. Instead, they tend to align their loan-granting strategy with the
preferences of the democratically elected board members. Third, the central
union tends to assign male managers to cooperatives with female-dominated
boards, probably to curb the social orientation of these boards. Overall,
gender is a key factor in considering social performance, but gender
interactions appear far more complex than previously thought. |