Non-financial disclosure and women on board : is a mandatory approach on gender quotas effective to increase communication quality?

The present study investigates the effects of women on companies' boards on the quality of nonfinancial information, and the influence that a mandatory approach has on this relationship. Previous studies have dealt with analysing the effects of female presence on CSR or ESG information, but few pieces of research have taken into account other strands of nonfinancial information and have resorted to an index to measure its quality. Therefore, this study aims to contribute by extending the analysis to any type of nonfinancial information communicated by a company. Moreover, the present research contributes to the strand of literature investigating the role of women on companies' boards. In fact, the results of the OLS regression analysis demonstrated that the presence of women with an executive role positively influences the quality of disclosure in Italy, and this relationship is not influenced by the advanced stage of application of the regulation on gender quotas.

Moreover, disclosure quality is significantly higher for firms that disclose a nonfinancial statement. Nevertheless, the study suffers from some limitations with respect to the sample size and the analysis of the trend in reporting after the introduction of Directive 2014/95/EU. [Publisher's text].