Does the Gender of Audit Partners Matter? Evidence from the Adoption of Rule 3211

• In Event: Audit Partner Characteristics and Audit Quality

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate whether the gender of audit partners impacts the audit outcomes and clients’ reporting behaviors after the adoption of the PCAOB Rule 3211. We focus on the gender effects on the audit practices based on the notion that females are more risk intolerant and are more concerned about their professional reputations. We find that audit quality of female audit partners improves compared with that of male audit partners after the adoption of the identification rule. We also find an increase in audit fees of clients with female audit partners after the adoption. Additionally, there is an increase in the level of audit efforts of female audit partners than that of their male counterparts. However, we do not find evidence that a female audit partner’s client exhibits greater conservatism than that of a male audit partner’s client. Moreover, this study synthetically considers the impact of the interaction among female audit partners, female CFOs and female audit committee members on the rule 3211 adoption. We find that the presence of female CFOs attenuates the gender effect on the audit report lags after the adoption of rule 3211. The presence of female audit committee members attenuates the gender effect on both audit fee and audit report lags after the adoption of rule 3211.

Authors

• Viet Tuan Pham, University of Texas at San Antonio

• Jie Hao, Texas Tech University

• Meng Guo, The University of Texas at San Antonio