Looking at nonprofit board performance through the lens of gendered leadership

Abstract

Despite an active stream of “good governance” research, there is not yet much nonprofit scholarship examining how the gender composition of a board or its leadership relates to board performance. This article helps to fill this gap, focusing on the governance practices of U.S.-based nonprofits serving a domestic or international membership. A structural equation model finds that the presence of female leaders relates to the performance of nonprofit boards both directly, and indirectly through these leaders’ presumed influence on board characteristics and operation. This research advances the field by empirically testing a longstanding theory that board performance is both multi-dimensional and contingent on the market and labor environment, organizational capacity and other characteristics—in this case, gender dynamics. These findings also suggest that a strategy to balance a board’s gender may serve many nonprofits.