Staff gender composition and Microfinance Institutions’ performance

Abstract

In this paper I study the relevance of staff gender composition for Microfinance Institutions financial performance using a dataset on European Microfinance Institutions. Results strongly suggest that females have a financial performance advantage in this sector and that the advantage is driven by differences in risk aversion between men and women. The relationship is estimated by ordinary least squares and instrumental variables, the second method is used to address with the endogeneity problem of the variable of interest (i.e. share of female in the MFIs).