Do board gender quotas affect how people perceive firms? A study of the California board gender quota law with Twitter sentiment data
Tutor / Supervisor
Barrot, Jean-Noël
Student
Toran Mercadé, Daniel
Document type
Master thesis
Date
2022
rights
Open Access
Publisher
Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya
UPCommons
Abstract
The first compulsory board gender diversity quota law in the United States was approved in 2018 in California. In this study, we aim to analyse how public perception has been influenced by the application of this gender quota law, using Twitter Sentiment Score of public companies affected by it. Specifically, the whole Twitter history between 2016-2021 of approximately 200 firms has been scrapped and the daily, monthly and yearly sentiment score has been computed. Moreover, the gender of the account associated with the tweet has been analysed in order to test differences between male and female sentiment. The results show that there is a positive effect of the increase in share of women in the board on the percentage of positive tweets. Moreover, the effects of the pool of tweets of women and men are opposite, positive for women and negative for men. Finally, the effect of the California gender quota law on Twitter sentiment has been studied. Those companies with a lower share of women(do not comply with the law after it was passed) experienced a higher increase in share of positive tweets in the post law period compared with the companies that were already complying with the law
Entitat col·laboradora
HEC Paris
Location
Participating teacher
- Barrot, Jean-Noël