Abstract
We respond to a call for more research on diversity and governance of cultural organizations (Castellini et al., 2020). Our objective is to assess whether the gender of governance actors matters for financial reporting quality of museum foundations. This topic is of particular importance given the private benefits of control typically held by museum directors. Psychology literature documents gender differences in personality traits (see e.g. Costa, 2001) and demonstrates that women exhibit slightly higher conscientiousness than men. Moreover, prior literature demonstrates that individual attributes of governance actors affect financial reporting (for an overview see Alhossini et al., 2021). We therefore predict a positive association between a museum foundation’s financial reporting quality and: 1. A female museum director 2. The proportion of female board members 3. A female external auditor. Our sample consists of all Norwegian museum foundations that have at least one employee in 2021-2022 and are being audited. We measure financial reporting quality in line with DeFond and Park (2001). We manually collect data for the governance characteristics of our observations. On average half of the museum foundation directors in our sample are women and half of the board members are women. About one third of the foundations are audited by a female auditor. In multivariate regression analyses, we find evidence of a positive association between female auditors and museum foundations’ financial reporting quality.
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
Diversity Equity Accessibility and Inclusion, Corporate Governance
