Journal of Security and Sustainability Issues

This paper finds out the impact of a board diversity in terms of nationality and gender diversity on sustainability of bank performance and risk in Indian Banking and Financial Industry over the period of 2011 – 2015. Our results show that the presence of foreign directors is found to lead into a worse firm performance, but no significant relationship is found for the existence of women directors on bank performance. The nationality and gender diversity are found to have positive and significant impact to the bank risk. By looking at this, the regulation in India should pay more attention to the inclusion of foreign and women directors in their board as the improvement of corporate governance in emerging markets. Some contributions are made in this paper, which are first, this study gives new perspective in India as emerging market especially in financial industry, while most of the studies are conducted in U.S. and Europe. Most of the studies in India regarding the impact of board diversity to bank performance are conducted in all sectors, not specifically on the banking and financial industry and there is not any research which is conducted to find the impact on bank risk. However, some limitations are found. First, limited sample as it only covers 22 banks and financial industries due to lack of data on board diversities. Second, only 2 diversities are examined, while there are more diversities could be observed, such as age, education, experience.