The impact of gender inclusion on the profits of global public tourism companies

Abstract

The present paper tests the impact of women’s inclusion and general equity market sentiment on Global tourism companies’ return on equity (ROE). With data panel regressions of the historical ROE data of the members of Refinitiv Global Hotel, we estimated several models that used the leverage and market capitalization, sentiment indexes (such as Economic Policy news, geopolitical news, pandemic news, currency market, commodity market or social media uncertainties) and the level of inclusion measured with the percentage of women in the board of directors, the percentage of women top managers or the percentage of women in the company. Our results suggest that there is only an inverse relationship between top management inclusion and ROE in leisure and recreation companies. From a geographical perspective, this negative relationship holds only in Asia, Europe, and Northern America. In Australasia (Australia), there is a positive relationship between top management inclusion and ROE. As expected, the company size has a direct and significant relationship with ROE, and the leverage is negative. Also, only the pandemic news fear harms profits due to sales reduction, management decisions due to fear, or cost increase. Our results align with the position that women’s inclusion has a weak impact on profits, suggesting more women inclusion without return loss in the company. Also, they contribute to the discussion that women’s management is more conservative and is exposed to a crystal cliff once they overcome a crystal roof in the company.