The Effect of Women’s Leadership on Carbon Disclosure by the Top 100 Global Energy Leaders

Abstract

The energy sector is one of the main sources of carbon emissions and the most significant global polluter. Women’s concerns and the climate crisis were strongly associated when issues about climate change were first articulated in the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals stressing gender equality and climate mitigation actions have received very little attention in the last decade. Consequently, the primary issues raised by this study are the energy industry, and women and climate change. This study examined the effect of women’s leadership on carbon disclosure among the top 100 global energy leaders from 2018 to 2020. This study unequivocally recognizes the effect of women’s leadership as assessed by the number of female board members who are industry experts, serve as advisors, and pose as proxy community leaders for global energy leaders. This study’s sample consisted of 291 observations of global energy leaders sourced from Thomson Reuters’ database. For the panel data analysis, STATA 14 (Version 14.) software was applied as the empirical methodology. The empirical findings showed that among the top energy leaders globally, women leaders increased the degree of carbon disclosure. The findings of this study provide novel insights into the importance of women’s leadership in the energy sector for enhancing and promoting carbon disclosure. The validity of hypothesized links in the findings lends support to the resource dependence theory from the viewpoint of the energy leaders. This study also provides guidance for practitioners, governments, and policymakers on how to combat climate change, encourage the inclusion of as many women as feasible on boards, the promotion of gender parity, and support efforts to achieve the net zero carbon target.

Dataset of exceptional women directors and carbon information disclosures of global energy companies

“…The repository [23] comprehends three excel files which indicated that Table A, B and C where each of them are referring to data collected; and derived from the related research article [1] . The content of the files is summarized in Table 1 .…”

“… File name Name of the data in article File description CID Scores (Table A).xlsx Table A Binary and total CID scores for each company WDs Engagement (Table B).xlsx Table B Percentage of WDs’ engagement based on their classifications and percentage on the board EWDs Aggregated Score (Table C).xlsx Table C WDs engagement scores marked by aggregated score among the four dimensions of EWDs. CID aggregated score based on 90 item of CID index in research article [1] …”

“…The data contains 97 companies with 291 observations from Thomson Reuters listings as in the related research article [1] . The data collected using purposive random sampling approach to select the companies as the sample.…”

“…The data collected using purposive random sampling approach to select the companies as the sample. As derived from the related research article [1] , the original tool to measure the CID originally developed by de Grosbois and Fennell [5] , Alrazi et al. [6] , and Bae Choi et al.…”

“… Dataset in this article contains solid information on the novel dataset of exceptional women directors (EWDs) and carbon information disclosures (CID) of global energy leading companies. The data presented is related to the research article entitled “The Effect of Women's Leadership on Carbon Disclosure by the Top 100 Global Energy Leaders” [1] . In exploring the degree of EWDs’ and the level of CID, the content analysis technique based on the enhanced scoring indicators were deployed to obtain the data of the 97 companies based on accessible materials from companies’ websites or any associated reports such as sustainability, environmental, annual, or integrated reports within three-year periods (2018 – 2020) for the global energy leading companies which listed in Thomson Reuters Database 2017.…”