The Influence Of Executive Gender On Firm Innovation Performance

Innovation is the strategic support to promote the high-quality development of enterprises and plays a decisive role in the sustainable development of economy.As the leading body of innovation activities,enterprises should constantly improve their innovation ability,improve their core competitiveness,and help our country to form an open innovation ecology.As the main body of innovation decision-making and implementation of innovation strategy,senior executives are directly related to enterprise innovation performance.In recent years,more and more scholars have paid attention to the impact of senior executives’ personal characteristics on corporate innovation performance.Among them,gender,as an important trait of senior executives,has a potential impact on their preferences and choices,and thus on corporate innovation decisions.At the same time,ownership concentration,as the core of corporate governance,is a means of internal control and plays an important moderating role in the influence of executive gender on corporate innovation performance.Based on this,it is of both theoretical and practical significance to explore the influence of executive gender on corporate innovation performance and the moderating effect of ownership concentration.On the basis of combing the theories and literature review related to executive gender and innovation performance,this paper breaks the traditional research paradigm of single executive position and single link innovation performance,and constructs a research framework based on leadership structure from the starting point of innovation to the end point of innovation.This paper takes A-share manufacturing listed companies in Shanghai and Shenzhen from 2015 to 2021 as the research objects,analyzes the influence of single position executive gender and executive gender combination on enterprise innovation performance,and the moderating effect of ownership concentration on corporate innovation performance by executive gender and executive gender combination is further studied.At the same time,the influence of executive gender on innovation efficiency under the firm heterogeneity of life cycle and property rights is discussed.The results show that compared with male,female CEO has a negative impact on the innovation input of enterprises,female CEO has a positive impact on innovation output and female CEO can significantly improve the innovation efficiency of enterprises.Specifically,when both CEO and CFO are females,it has the most significant positive impact on the innovation efficiency of the enterprise.However,the form of senior management combination with male CEO and female CFO will significantly inhibit the innovation efficiency of the enterprise.Equity concentration has a negative moderating effect on innovation input and innovation efficiency of female CEO,but has no moderating effect on innovation output.Meanwhile,equity concentration has a different moderating effect on innovation efficiency of different executive gender portfolios.The influence of executive gender on the innovation efficiency of firms is characterized by the heterogeneity of firm life cycle and property rights.Finally,this paper puts forward some suggestions from the aspects of optimizing women’s career development,designing reasonable management structure and adjusting equity structure,so as to improve enterprise innovation performance.