The debt-to-equity ratio is useful for showing a company ́s financial capacity. As a result of the accompanying risks that a high level of leverage entails, most companies strive to be financed by equity as much as possible. However, tax benefits obtained through debt financing add complexity to the issue as a trade-off between risk and reward should be carefully considered. Previous empirical literature has shown that there is a relationship between the composition of the board, the gender of the CEO and the company’s capital structure. 

The purpose of this study is to describe and analyze the relationship between the composition of the board and the CEO’s gender as well as the company’s capital structure in Swedish listed companies of Large, Mid and Small Cap between the years 2016 – 2020. This is done through a quantitative method where secondary data is analyzed through a multiple regression analysis. The result shows that there is no statistically significant relationship between the composition of the board and the company’s debt-to-equity ratio, while there is a negative statistically significant relationship between the CEO’s gender and the company’s debt-to-equity ratio. This leads to one of the study’s two hypotheses being rejected while the other hypothesis is accepted.