Gender diversity in European firms and the R&D-innovation-productivity nexus

In this paper, we empirically explore whether gender diversity in European firms, measured at different organisational levels, contributes to enhancing their performance in terms of innovation and productivity. Particularly we propose a structural econometric framework that allows us to simultaneously account for gender diversity at the workforce and ownership level throughout different phases of the innovation process, from the decision to engage in R&D to productivity. Our results reveal that gender diversity is strongly related to firms’ performance, besides the traditional factors envisaged by the literature. However, some differences emerge according to the firms’ organisational levels. Indeed, workforce gender diversity seems to be relevant to all phases of the innovation process. By contrast, the positive influence of ownership gender diversity seems more narrowed as limited to the innovation development/implementation phase; moreover, increasing women’s participation beyond a certain threshold is negatively associated with firms’ productivity.