Preface

As the company's decision-making and supervision organization, the board is important to the development of the company. Good behavior of the board provides the intellectual capital and lasting power for the development of enterprises. Optimization of the structure of the board can improve the quality of decision-making and supervisory function of the board. The gender structure of the board is an important research content. Gender heterogeneity of the board attracts more and more attention in the industrial sector, and governments enact laws and regulations, which requires women to be accounted to reach a certain proportion in the board, such as Norway, Spain, France, etc. In the academic field, researches on the gender diversity of the board have gradually increased, and most of the literature has found that female directors play a positive role in corporate governance. So in Chinese capital market, do the female directors also play an important role in the corporate governance? Whether can the listed companies learn from abroad, and improve corporate governance by the gender diversification of the board, so as to gain an advantage in the increasingly competitive market? In this paper, from several perspectives of the agency costs, that is, executive pay, cash dividends, related party transactions, we study whether the female directors of the Chinese listed companies is able to improve corporate governance and ease the company's agency costs.

The communique, released at the end of the G20 Hangzhou summit, pointed out that governments take relevant policies to ensure women and young entrepreneurs rights, and ensure women-led companies to benefit from the global value chain. Drucker, a master of modern management, said, “the transformation of the times is in line with the characteristics of women.”As an important role of female executives, female directors attract more and more attention in the industrial and academic circles. An investigation named“International Commercial Questionnaire Survey Report”issued in 2016, which is carried out by the Grant Thornton International Ltd., shows that although the global average proportion of female directors is 17%, less than 20%, but 45% of the world listed companies support the policy of commitment to a quota of the female board members. In China, the proportion of listed companies in the mainland to support such quotas even as high as 85%. With the emphasis on female directors in the practical field, gender heterogeneity of board has become a hot research topic in the academic fields in recent years. Introducing the characteristics of the female directors into the company's principal-agent theory, the high order echelon theory, resource dependence theory and individual cognitive limitation theory, we try to explain the impact of female directors on corporate governance from multiple perspectives. This article first combed the literature of the summary of the advantages of women relative to men in management positions, such as women more risk aversion, more carefully and more dedicated. And then this article analyzes the characteristics of the female in the board. This paper introduces the characteristics of female personality into the principal-agent theory, and the literature finds that women directors can strengthen the supervision of the manager, which reduces the agency costs of the company. For further study of the effect of female directors on the agency costs, combined with several classic research objects in agent cost—executive compensation, cash dividend, related transactions, by putting forward the hypothesis and the establishment of empirical model, we research the impact of female directors on these aspects. The main contents of the paper are:The first chapter is the introduction. This chapter introduces the background of this study, and analyzes the content and the logical framework of the study and research methods, to provide a general framework for the study. The second chapter is the literature review. First, this part sorts out the relevant literature on female executives, and the relevant literature on the impact of female directors on corporate governance. Because this research is mainly about the influence of female directors on executive compensation, cash dividend, related transactions, we reviews the literature of influence of corporate governance on executive pay, the influence of corporate governance on cash dividend, the influence of corporate governance on the related transactions. Finally, according to the characteristics of female directors, we analyze the influence of female directors on the corporate governance from the aspect of executive compensation, cash dividend, related party transactions. The third chapter is the theoretical basis. Firstly, based on the principal-agent theory, we explain the importance of the board to corporate governance. Then it introduces the role of internal control system and external control system in corporate governance, to prepare for the following research. Besides, it introduces the theories of gender heterogeneity of the board, including the high order echelon theory, resource dependence theory and individual cognitive limitation theory. These theories explain the importance of the heterogeneity of the board from different angles, which is the theoretical preparation for the following specific research. The fourth chapter is the research of the influence of the female directors on the executive compensation. As excess executives compensation, huge pay-gap between employees and executives and low pay-performance sensitivity become universal phenomenons, in this part, we analyze whether female directors effect on executive compensation in various aspects, and then put forward the hypothesis, establish corresponding model, finally draw the conclusion from the empirical results. The fifth chapter is the research of the influence of the female directors on the cash dividend. As the cash dividend is considered to be one of the main agency problem between the shareholders and managers in the company, the article studies the impact of female directors on the cash dividend. As the cash dividend policy is affected by the status of corporate governance, the article consider the relationship between cash dividend and female directors is also affected by the corporate governance. Then we suggest hypotheses and establish models, finally draw the conclusion from empirical study. The sixth chapter studies the influence of female directors on the related party transactions. In order to investigate whether the female directors can strengthen the supervision of managers and large shareholders to avoid them to grab the interests of the company, the article studies the impact of female directors on the related transactions. According to female directors“Endowment”，from the perspectives of possibility of related transactions, related transaction frequency, related party transactions size, and cash flow occupancy by related party transactions, we put forward the hypothesis, then set up Probit model and OLS model, from different perspectives to research the influence of female directors on the related party transactions. The seventh chapter is the summary of the full text. By summarizing the research results and conclusions, this paper points out the shortcomings and future directions of the research. The innovation of this paper is in the following aspects:First, this paper first comprehensively studies the impact of the board gender diversity on corporate governance in China. Most of the literature about the board is from the background of directors to research the influence of the board on corporate governance, including independence, demographic characteristics, profes sional characteristics and political background of the board, but there are few domestic researches about the impact of board gender on the corporate governance. This paper studies the influence of directors'gender diversity on corporate governance. Foreign literature on women executives usually has four definitions:female CEO, female CFO, female directors, and all the female executives. Most literature focus on the study of the influence of female CEO or CFO on corporate governance. Female directors are usually excluded from the study of female executives. On behalf of the interests of shareholders, directors are the company's decision makers and supervisors; and the manager is the executor, and the purpose of manager is to maximize his own interests. The mechanism of corporate governance of them are different. And the influence of manager on corporate governance largely depends on the company pay system and supervision. Therefore, it is necessary to study the influence of gender heterogeneity on corporate governance from the perspective of directors. Besides, this paper also enriches the research about the influence of board characteristics on corporate governance. In addition, the proportion of female CEO in China only reaches 4%（Li Xiaorong and Liu, 2012）, and the proportion of listed companies which have women directors reaches more than 70%, and the average proportion of women in the board reaches 14%. The“International Commercial Questionnaire Survey Report”issued by Grant Thornton International Ltd in 2016 shows that 85% of the Chinese listed companies support the policy of commitment to an quota of the female board members. It shows that the influence of the board gender diversity on corporate governance is of great significance. Second, risk aversion of female executives is the main point of many studies on gender diversity of executives. However, the mechanism of the influence of female directors on corporate governance maybe in different ways. For example, more independence makes female directors play a role in improving corporate governance; and female directors prefer fair deal, which may reduce the salary gap between executives and employees. But these characteristics of female directors have not been paid attention to. Although limited availability of data makes us can't analyze how much the characteristics of female directors' risk aversion, or independence, diligence will effect the corporate governance in detail, but in normative research, we try to explain a verities of mechanisms by which the female directors improve the company governance. Third, this paper analyzes the difference of the gender structure of the board in different ownership of the listed companies for the first time. Because of the particularity of China economic system, the state-owned listed companies, less democratic and less opened, are influenced by the planned economy and used to obey orders. So the concept of gender equality is insufficient, and women right to speak is weaker. In the descriptive statistics, we analysis the differences of female directors in state-owned and non state-owned enterprises in the distribution; in the empirical analysis section of the influence of female directors on executive compensation, we compare the different effect of female directors on the state-owned and on the non state-owned listed companies for the first time. This paper provides a support for the point that improving the gender structure of the board can improving the governance of the board of state-owned enterprises, which reduces the agency problems of state-owned enterprises. Fourth, this paper first combines the company's internal control mechanism and external governance environment to study the impact of female directors on corporate governance. The traditional literature on female directors mainly focused on the influence of female directors on internal corporate governance, to research female directors to ease the conflict of interest between managers and shareholders or the conflicts of large shareholders and small shareholders. Few literature are from the aspect of external governance environment to analysis this problem. In reality, the internal and external governance mechanisms are complementary to each other. The control market and workplace reputation of the external governance mechanisms can play a role in constraint of the manager:the stock price crash risk may result in the the transfer of company and the reputation damage of the directors. For the purpose of avoiding risk, female directors would like to take the initiative to strengthen the internal supervision of the manager, and increase the transparency of information in the external market, which will reduce the risk of stock price collapse. By researching the impact of female directors on the risk of stock price crash, we show the evidence that the optimization of the company's internal governance can improve the corporate governance through external mechanisms.

Key words:female directors, executive pay, cash dividend, related party transactions