Women in the boardroom and fraud: Evidence from Australia

Abstract

We examine the relationship between women’s representation on corporate boards and fraud. Drawing on a discussion of existing studies, we hypothesise that increasing women’s representation on boards can help mitigate fraud. We provide validation to our conjecture through an empirical analysis of 128 publicly listed companies in Australia. We show that the increase in women’s representation on company boards is associated with a decreased probability of fraud. We demonstrate the consistency of this result across different robustness checks. We believe that our findings could be of interest to policy makers interested in enhancing board governance and monitoring.