Does Board Gender Diversity Affect Inventor Productivity? A comparison of inventor productivity before and after enactment of gender quota mandate on boards of publicly listed companies in Norway

Abstract

Norway was the first country to mandate a gender quota for corporate boards of publicly listed firms. This quota mandates that publicly listed companies in Norway must have 40% representation of each gender on the board of directors. We analyze the effect, if any, of the 2003 regulatory change on the innovative productivity of inventors in Norway. The regulation was enacted for all publicly listed companies in Norway on 15. August 2007 and required non-abiding firms to be disbanded. Firms’ research and development efforts rely heavily on problem-solving; creating the best possible premise for this is critical. Previous studies have shown that a broader composition of development teams, for example a better gender balance, improves team performance. We research whether the regulatory change requiring more female directors affected inventor teams and female inventor productivity. We employ fixed effects ordinary least squares regression on a sample with 5,218 unique patents by 6,906 inventors from 1995 to 2014. We find no significant impact of the regulation on Patent Count or Citation-Weighted Patent Count for inventors employed by listed or unlisted firms. This finding is in agreement with previous literature, which is characterized by ambiguous results and non-significant coefficients signaling a minimal impact of the regulation on innovation and financial measures.