Unfolding the relationship between female involvement and firms intellectual capital

This study aims to explore whether and how HR practices aimed at improving female involvement in the workplace along the employee life cycle affect the firm’s intellectual capital. In doing so, we take a nuanced perspective that disentangles the Value-Added Intellectual Capital (VAIC) into its three dimensions of human capital efficiency (HCE), structural capital efficiency (SCE), and capital employed efficiency (CEE). We built a dataset of 70 firm/year observations of Italian listed firms ranked in the Top45 list of Stoxx Italy 45 ESG-X as of March 2020. Based on this, we run Tobit regression analyses to assess the impact of three areas of HR practices in terms of female involvement, i.e. recruitment, development and training, and retention, on the three dimensions of the VAIC. Results indicate that female-sensitive HR practices related to recruitment positively affect structural capital efficiency, while development and training are negatively associated with capital employed efficiency. This study offers several implications to managers, in terms of encouraging the adoption of a female orientation in their HR practices along the entire employee life cycle. Managers should also be aware that various HR practices have different time manifestations on the drivers of intellectual capital. This paper contributes to the ongoing debate on the connections between diversity management and intellectual capital by disentangling the various dimensions of the VAIC and separately assessing the impact of different HR practices along the employee life cycle