表題番号:2020C-174 日付:2020/11/07
研究課題Survival analysis of female director: An empirical research in Japan
研究者所属(当時) 資格 氏名
(代表者) 商学学術院 商学部 助手 グエン ティ フォン タン
研究成果概要

This paper examines the corporate lives of female directors in Japan. Using data of Japanese non-financial listed firms from 2005 to 2014, we focus on the firm group that introduce female directors to their all male boards for the first time.

              In details, we constructed a panel data of listed non-financial firms in Japan from 2005 to 2014, obtaining about 9,600 firm-year observations from four profound databases, CSR Ranking Database, CSR Database published, Yakuin Shikiho (Directory of Directors) and Nikkei Corporate Governance Evaluation System (CGES). First introduction of female directors is defined as the event that firms introduced at least one female director on their boards for the first-time. 

              Our database shows that female directors cover a small part of the boardroom. Only 9% of firm-year observations have at least one female director on board. We examined the determinant of firms introducing their first female directors and found that that these firms are associated with larger board size, more outside directors on board, higher managerial ownership and foreign ownership ratio, higher ratio of woman officers but lower ratio of women at managerial positions. We also gauge the initial effects of ‘Womanomics’ and found a positive impact of the policy package on the increase of newly-introduced female directors but not statistically significant.

Overall, during the research period, there are 134 individual firms appointing their first female directors and the total individual female directors are 140 people. 60% of first-introduced female director are outside directors. In recent years 2013 and 2014, there is a significant increase of first introduction of outside female directors, two times higher than the introduction of inside female directors.

Regarding the background of first-introduced female directors, most first-introduced female directors are truly firm insiders. They often joined firms from young, trained internally by rotating among different departments and gradually climbed the corporate ladders to higher positions as managers, executives and eventually directors after ten years in service. Regarding the introduction stories of first outside female directors, we find three popular sources that firms often seek for: professional directors from other firms, university professors and female CEOs from partner firms.

The survival analysis of first-introduced female director shows that inside directors stay longer, some were eventually promoted to CEO-ship while the lifecycle of outside female director is rather shorter than inside female directors. However, the difference is not statistically significant due to the limited sample and the short research period.