markets instead of bull markets. Nevertheless, only one-third of the equity mutual funds in this study can reveal the excess returns compared to benchmark. For the per- sistence of equity mutual fund

three female directors constitute a critical threshold (Kanter, 1977; Liu et al., 2014; Joecks et al., 2013; Brahma, Nwofar, and Boateng, 2019). Corroborating this argument, our results reveal that the