Investor response to appointment of female CEOs and CFOs

We study the impact of appointing women to top executive positions from an investor perspective. We analyze whether shareholders value announcement of appointment of women to top positions differently than they do appointment of men. This study uses an international sample of 100 announcements of top executive appointments of women who replace men and investigates how shareholders respond to such appointments. This research combines an event study with a matched pair analysis to compare the response from investors regarding appointment of female versus male CEOs and CFOs. We establish that investors do not seem to value appointment of women significantly differently from that of men. This finding suggests that, from the investor perspective, there appears to be no business case for a particular gender when it comes to appointing a CEO or CFO.