Board gender diversity and bank performance in Africa: A scoping review of empirical evidence

Abstract

This scoping review maps empirical evidence on the relationship between board gender diversity and bank performance in African banking systems. The review responds to a fragmented literature in which evidence remains uneven across geography, conceptualization, measurement, and empirical design. Following the Arksey and O'Malley framework, the Levac et al. refinement, JBI methodological guidance, and PRISMA-ScR reporting principles, the study searched Scopus as a single bibliographic source and retained 11 empirical studies published up to 1 April 2026. Eligible studies focused on banks or financial institutions, treated board gender diversity as a governance variable, and examined profitability, efficiency, risk, stability, disclosure, failure probability, or resilience. The synthesis is exploratory and cartographic rather than meta-analytical; therefore, it does not estimate a pooled effect size. Results show that the evidence is concentrated mainly in Nigeria and Ghana, while North Africa remains thinly represented and Morocco is absent from the retained empirical corpus. Board gender diversity is most frequently operationalized through the proportion of women directors or the presence of at least one woman on the board, whereas bank performance remains largely measured through ROA and ROE. More recent studies increasingly incorporate efficiency, risk, stability, disclosure, and bank-failure outcomes. Findings are mixed and depend on measurement choices, estimation strategy, institutional setting, and whether female representation translates into substantive influence through monitoring, committee participation, risk oversight, disclosure quality, and strategic decision-making. The review concludes that board gender diversity should not be interpreted as an automatic determinant of bank performance, but as a context-sensitive governance resource whose effect depends on institutional conditions, board processes, and critical-mass dynamics.

JEL Classification: G21; G34; J16; M14.

Paper type: Theoretical Research / Scoping Review.