Public Attention to Gender Equality and Stock Market Returns

ABSTRACT We examine the potential relationship between public attention to gender equality and returns on two U.S. gender‐diversity stock indices (the MSCI USA Women's Leadership and the Morningstar Women's Empowerment index) in comparison to their traditional counterparts (the MSCI USA and the Morningstar USA index) over the 2017–2022 period. We consider several measures of public attention to gender equality: (1) the U.S. daily Google Search Volume Index for different keywords related to gender equality, (2) the number of daily visits to specific Wikipedia pages devoted to gender equality, and (3) the daily number of news stories related to this phenomenon. We find a positive association between public attention to gender equality and returns on U.S. gender‐diversity stock indices. We attribute this result to an increasing investor preferences for owning stocks of companies that promote gender diversity in the workplace during periods of high public attention to gender equality. This finding, which is robust to a battery of alternative estimation methods and proxies, offers important managerial and public policy implications.