Beyond Uniformity: How Board Gender Diversity Shapes Firm Performance? A Bibliometric and Content Analysis Vol. 31, Issue 01, 2026

Abstract

Board diversity, a key determinant of strategic decision-making and financial performance, has gained enormous attraction from academia, fascinating scientific researchers to contribute to this topic. Among various dimensions of diversity, board gender diversity has received substantial academic and regulatory attention due to its theoretical grounding and empirical relevance. This study is an effort to systematically evaluate the existing literature on board diversity through a mix of bibliometric and content analysis of 400 research articles retrieved from the Scopus database for the time period 2015-2023. The findings reveal strong international collaboration between researchers from developed and developing economies, with publications concentrated in top-ranked finance and governance journals. This study also identifies several theories describing the board gender diversity and firm performance nexus. This study also examines the trending themes, highlights impediments to growth in literature and makes recommendations for future studies. Among other attributes, this study only focused on gender diversity and future studies should focus on other definitions of diversity, e.g., age, nationality, size, education level, tenure, and experience.