Joel Suss, Marilena Angeli and Peter Eckley
Diversity has risen up the agendas of businesses, regulators, and governments in recent years. How diverse are the upper echelons of banks and building societies in the UK? We answer this question in a recent paper using a unique data on the most senior employees for the last 20 years.
Continue reading “Diversity in UK banks – the long journey continues”Ann Owen and Judit Temesvary
Earlier this year the Bank hosted a joint conference with the ECB and the Federal Reserve Board on Gender and Career Progression. In this guest post one of the speakers, Ann Owen, discusses her work with Judit Temesvary on how the composition of boards affects decision making and ultimately performance in the banking sector.
The representation of women on boards of US bank holding companies has increased (chart 1), but nevertheless remains well below the share of women in the overall employee base (chart 2). While this also raises questions of equity, our research asks if a lack of gender diversity on bank boards has an economic impact on their performance. We find that it does, and that this effect depends on 1) the existing level of gender diversity on the board, and 2) the level of bank capitalization. If risk-weighted capital ratios are a proxy for the quality of bank management, our findings suggest that at well-managed banks, gender diversity has a positive impact on bank performance- but only once a threshold level of diversity is reached.
Continue reading “Gender diversity on Bank Board of Directors and performance”