Investors are more likely to support activist campaigns if they target organizations with female CEOs as opposed to those with male CEOs, The Wall Street Journal reported Feb. 5.
The findings are based on a new study, published in the Journal of Applied Psychology, conducted between 2017 and 2021. It involved asking about 500 investors to complete online surveys describing a scenario in which an activist investor sent them a letter asking for help to get them elected onto a company's board in which the study participant was a shareholder. In some scenarios, the company had a female CEO and in others it had a male.
When the company had a female CEO, 82.5 percent of investors said they'd vote to support the activist investor, whereas when the company had a male CEO, only 62.5 percent of investors said they'd vote the same way. Although the researchers of the study were able to find that investors found male and female CEOs to be equally competent, the results of this scenario proves different.
"It can be difficult to detect those stereotypical influences when you ask people to make a subjective judgment," Amanda Cowen, a co-author of the study, told the Journal. "But it becomes more visible when you’re asking them to make a choice — for example, in the proxy voting context."