Does gender diversity in forest sector companies matter?

The extant literature concerned with enhancing competitiveness of forest sector companies has focused on phenomena rather than people who would drive those phenomena. Generally, human resource management research is sparse in the forest sector literature, despite well-documented knowledge that companies succeed more because of their people than because of any other factor. This article brings human resource issues to the core conversation in forest sector competitiveness research. Specifically, we focus on the link between gender diversity in top leadership and firm financial performance and suggest pathways to improve workforce diversity. The timing of our study is fortuitous, as the graying workforce in the sector will create space for a new generation of leaders. Our argument is that diversity issues should be more proactively addressed in forest sector workforce recruitment not just because it is the right thing to do, but also because it has an underlying business case. This is an exploratory study, which is a first step in paving the way for future work on diversity management among forest sector companies. Our findings suggest that more gender diverse top management teams are associated with higher financial performance but that the level of gender diversity in boards of directors has no association with financial performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]