The Strategic Influence of Women Leaders on Board Committee Composition: Evidence From Asian Economies

ABSTRACT Despite substantial research on women's board representation, evidence on how women directors collectively shape board‐level outcomes remains inconsistent and underspecified. Drawing on female advantage theory and institutional theory, this study examines the impact of women directors' accumulated tenure‐weighted collective presence on the distribution of committee capital, that is, the aggregate human and social capital of committee members between monitoring and advisory functions. Using a panel dataset of 14,115 non‐financial firm‐year observations across nine Asian economies (2010–2020), we find that higher collective presence of women directors is positively associated with greater committee capital concentration in monitoring relative to advisory committees. This association is amplified when the firm's CEO is also a woman which is consistent with both legitimating and structural appointment mechanisms and is attenuated in societies with higher gender equality, where the institutional pressures that concentrate women directors' collective governance contributions in monitoring domains are less binding. Findings are robust across alternative variable specifications, Heckman selection correction, and propensity score matching. The study advances understanding of women's governance leadership by demonstrating that the committee capital effects of women's board representation depend on the accumulated collective conditions, for example, organizational and societal that enable minority governance influence, rather than on individual appointments alone.