ЖЕНЩИНЫ В КОЛЛЕГИЯХ И ЭФФЕКТИВНОСТЬ МАЛОГО И СРЕДНЕГО БИЗНЕСА: Доказательства, Политика и Путь к Инклюзивному Управлению

The governance gap is real — and this book proves it with data. Drawing on the most comprehensive empirical study of gender diversity and SME governance yet conducted, Women on Boards and SME Performance presents evidence from 15,966 Italian non-financial companies assessed by Cerved Rating Agency over five years. The findings are unambiguous: firms in which women hold more than 30% of board seats are more profitable, carry less financial risk, and present meaningfully lower probabilities of default than their less diverse counterparts. The gap in default probability between the two groups reaches 69 basis points among SMEs — not a rounding error, but a robust signal across the largest dataset of its kind in the published literature. The EBITDA margin advantage is 62 basis points. Gender-diverse SMEs carry less equity leverage. And the effect is consistent across every segment of the data. This is not a book about social justice. It is a book about financial performance, credit risk, and competitive advantage. What you will find inside: Each chapter concludes with a Policy Transfer Toolkit: structured guidance on extracting lessons from the evidence and applying them in different national and institutional contexts. Whether you are an entrepreneur reconsidering your board's composition, a policymaker seeking evidence-based instruments for the unlisted sector, a banker interested in governance as a credit risk factor, or a researcher working on gender diversity and firm performance, this book provides a foundation grounded in real data from real firms. The economic case for inclusive governance is no longer an argument. It is a dataset.