Board Diversity and Firm Performance

The aim of this paper is to identify, through the analysis of the academic literature available, the links between diversity in the board room and the performance of the firm. In the past decades we have seen an increasing focus on good corporate governance and board diversity has started to become one of the most discussed ways of management. This paper intends, with the help of previous researches, to clarify what board diversity really means and whether this affects, either positively or negatively, the financial performance of a firm. As past papers have already demonstrated, there is no clear answer to this question and results are considered inconclusive; in fact, researchers have come to different results in the study of this topic. Nevertheless, we can say that the general trend shows a positive correlation between board diversity and firm performance, especially in some specific cases.