Firm size, market power, and corporate governance determinants of women representation on corporate boards in Ghanaian listed firms

Abstract

This study investigates how firm size and market power influence representation of women on corporate boards in Ghana, addressing a critical but overlooked question in African corporate governance: why structural gender imbalances persist even as regulatory and normative pressures intensify. Using heteroskedasticity- and autocorrelation-robust static panel estimators, Panel-Corrected Standard Errors (PCSE), and triangulating with Random Effects and Panel GLS models, the analysis demonstrates that firm size and market power significantly increase female board representation, while board size and independence serve as enabling conditions. Conversely, government ownership, industry affiliation, and board tenure suppress inclusion. The positive effects of foreign ownership highlight the role of global governance norms. These results are stable across all robustness checks from Arellano-Bond one-step GMM, system GMM, and pooled regression. The evidence supports policy reforms mandating gender-disclosure requirements, tenure-refresh mechanisms, transparent nomination processes, and stewardship interventions from institutional and foreign investors to strengthen inclusive governance in frontier markets. Strengthening board gender diversity enhances ethical leadership, organisational legitimacy, and progress toward SDG-5, with broader spillovers for inclusive economic development. The study provides the first empirically integrated framework in a frontier African capital market that jointly examines market power, organisational scale, ownership structures, and governance mechanisms as determinants of board gender diversity. Methodologically, it introduces a novel combination of PCSE and dynamic GMM estimators tailored for African governance data. Substantively, it advances legitimacy, agency, and institutional theories by revealing how structural power and contextual institutional pressures condition gender-diversity trajectories, an area previously underexplored in emerging-market research.