Agents of change: Women in top management and corporate environmental performance

Abstract

We analyze the influence of gender diversity in top management on the environmental performance of French firms. Consistent with gender socialization theory, which posits that women are raised from childhood to be more nurturing and compassionate for others, we find that firms with more women in top management exhibit higher environmental performance. This result extends those already reported in the literature regarding the effect of gender diversity at board level. We also show that women in top management are associated with several key indicators such as development of eco-friendly products and commitment to resource reduction. Furthermore, we find that the influence of women is weaker in firms with a lower environmental performance and in firms with high growth opportunities since these firms are likely to prioritize their own development. This suggest, in line with social role theory, that women also adapt into the role that organizations expect from them.

Environmental Performance of the Tourism Sector from a Gender Diversity Perspective

“…From this perspective, women have been found to have a stronger social orientation than men [46]. Together with a more inclusive personality, this orientation leads to greater concern for stakeholders and attention to their needs [47], resulting in a greater number of social and environmental practices to meet stakeholder expectations [34,48]. Several studies support this theory in terms of the positive effect of gender diversity on environmental performance [49][50][51].…”

“…The results for the relationship of interest are also shown. [27,47,85,89] Use of resources [27,71,85] Emissions [19,47,72,85,[90][91][92] Environmental innovation [30,31,93,94] Environmental performance Negative relationship [87] Consumption of water and energy [95] Environmental innovation [28,34,[96][97][98][99][100][101][102][103][104][105][106] Environmental performance No relationship [29] Consumption of energy [27,85] Environmental innovation Source: authors, based on the literature review.…”

“…This relationship has been confirmed for samples from various countries and regions. Specifically, studies have been conducted in the United States [26,42,43,50,64,83], France [47], the United Kingdom [25], China [86], Australia [85], Europe [27,77,88] and globally [44,73,96].…”

Corporate Social Responsibility in the European Banking Sector: Commitment to the 2030 Agenda and Its Relationship with Gender Diversity

“…They are, therefore, more likely to implement policies and initiatives to combat this phenomenon [62]. Thus, there is ample evidence that board gender diversity positively influences companies' environmental performance [122][123][124][125].…”

Social determinants of sustainability: The imprinting effect of social class background on corporate environmental responsibility

“…We integrate insight from the literature on upper eche- According to upper echelons, the background and life experiences of decision-makers are likely to exert an important influence on strategic decisions (Hambrick & Mason, 1984), especially on the extent and pattern of CER strategy (Menguc et al, 2010). Most researchers examining the evidence for upper echelons have analysed the relationships between executive demographic characteristics and firm CER behaviour (Burkhardt, Nguyen, & Poincelot, 2020;Shahab, Ntim, Ye, Ullah, & Fosu, 2018). Nevertheless, among the plethora of executive characteristics examined, consideration of executive social class background is lacking.…”