DEMOGRAPHIC DIVERSITY IN THE BOARDROOM: DOES GENDER AFFECT CORPORATE SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY AND FIRM REPUTATION IN KENYA

Board of directors is the decision-making organ in the organization that faces complex tasks pertaining to strategic-issue processing. It comprises of directors from various backgrounds hence face interaction difficulties that can prevent them from fulfilling their tasks. This study, will investigate whether the board diversity influences CSR and firm reputation in Kenya. This will capture the boards’ monitoring and resource provision abilities; and it will be in line with Agency and resource dependency theories. The general objective to the study is to establish whether board diversity influences firm’s CSR and corporate reputation in Kenya. There have been studies on how board diversity on firm performance and CSR but no paper has been published looking at the corporate reputation and more over concerning gender diversity on boards in developing countries.The number of women in the board has a significant impact on corporate social responsibility and corporate reputation. Women bring a number of strengths to the board including an increased sensitivity to CSR and participative decision-making styles and these benefits contribute to enhanced corporate responsibility strength ratings.This study makes a theoretical contribution to the corporate governance literature by analysing board diversity within the framework of two major theories Agency and Resource. This study also makes a theoretical contribution to the diversity and governance literature by providing a better understanding of the relationships between board gender, professional and experience diversity and ？rm’s CSR and reputation.This study will be beneficial to the management of corporations and top management in decision making especially on the issue of SCR and the firm’s reputation. It will also lay ground for more studies to be conducted in Kenya and other developing nations.