The influence of gender diversity and company financial performance in East Africa

Abstract

The main aim of this study was to examine the influence of gender diversity on financial performance of EAC’s listed companies and to compare influence of gender diversity on company’s financial performance before and after the operationalisation of the East African Community (EAC) Common Market in 2010. The authors adopted a positivist paradigm in a quantitative analysis using non probability sampling to select forty-two EAC listed companies. They developed hypothesises basing on secondary data from data stream database and annual reports. SPSS was used to generate correlation, and regression results. The findings indicated that gender diversity of the board has no statistically significant influence on company financial performance measured by Return on Assets (ROA), Return on Equity (ROE), Tobin Q ratio (TBQ) and Price Earnings Ratio (PER). Secondly, the authors discovered no changes in gender diversity for most listed companies for the period before and after operationalisation of the EAC - Common Market.