Conclusion
Traditionally, the number of women serving in senior corporate executive roles has been low (Carter et al. 2003, 2010). However, concerted national and international governance, regulatory and legal reforms, as well as positive initiatives that have been pursued worldwide over the past three decades have helped in bringing about a steady increase in the number and percentage of women currently occupying such senior corporate executive roles (Adams 2016; Adams and Ferreira 2009; Srinidhi et al. 2011). Much of such positive reform is driven by theoretical and empirical evidence, which suggests that gender-diverse boards not only enhance corporate performance/value by improving independence, monitoring, advisory capacity and resources (Carter et al. 2003, 2010; Gul et al. 2011; Liu et al. 2014; Shrader et al. 1997), but also reduce corporate fraud and wrong-doing through enhancement in risk-aversion and ethical orientation (Ho et al. 2015; Palvia et al. 2015; Peni and Vahamaa 2010; Sun et al. 2017). For example and of close relevance to our current study, the findings of several studies suggest that female directors are associated with: (i) more conservative financial reporting (Ho et al. 2015; Palvia et al. 2015), (ii) higher accounting quality (Barua et al. 2010b), and (iii) lower fraudulent financial reporting (Sun et al. 2017), amongst others. A major empirical research question that has been investigated less often, however, is whether women executives are more ethical or risk-averse than their male counterparts are. A priori, if women are more risk-averse than ethical, then, we conjecture that with the possibility of facing costly legal action, they are more likely to shift to a more subtle, less risky and difficult-to-detect corporate activity (Abernathyet al. 2014; Alfonso et al. 2015), but one that is nonetheless equally un-ethical (Zalata and Roberts 2016, 2017).
