Women have traditionally been underrepresented on boards of companies, but after some social and legal pressure their presence has been increased during recent years. This paper examines the relation of the presence of female directors both at board meetings and at audit and remuneration committees, with CEO pay and the shareholders' consultative vote on managerial remuneration plans (“say on pay”). Using a large sample of Spanish firms listed between 2011 and 2015, our study reveals that firms with female representation on their remuneration committee, display lower levels of CEO pay and CEO pay growth. We also obtain evidence that this effect is attributable to the proprietary female directors. Additionally, from the “say on pay” perspective, female membership of the remuneration committee is associated with a lower number of votes in terms of director remuneration reports and related policies. Overall, our results indicate that female directors on the remuneration committee contribute to a moderation of executive remuneration growth and are consequently perceived by shareholders as valuable resources in the design of executive remuneration plans. This confirms the influence of the minority group, females, in the sustainable progress of these companies. Our results support the presence of female directors not only as a social measure or tokenism, but also as a contribution to good governance practice.

Using a sample of US listed firms over the 1989–2012 period, we find that financially constrained dividend-increasing firms experience superior short-run abnormal stock returns, but suffer worse operating performance compared to similar unconstrained firms. More specifically, constrained firms in more competitive industries realize poorer long-run and operating performance. Likewise, constrained firms that increase dividends during the financial crisis also deliver inferior post-dividend-increase long-run return than do unconstrained firms. We also find evidence that constrained firms show worse stock market reaction to new equity issue announcements following dividend increase, but display a positive market response if they potentially have high investment growth opportunities. Our results are robust to alternative financial constraint proxies and abnormal return measures.