The Eco Gender Gap in Boardrooms

The Eco Gender Gap in Boardrooms

Po-Hsuan Hsu, Kai Li, Yihui Pan

Series number :

Serial Number: 
861/2022

Date posted :

December 12 2022

Last revised :

October 16 2023
SSRN Share

Keywords

  • female directors; boards; corporate environmental performance; pollution prevention; emissions; board gender quota

Using firm- and facility-level measures from 2002 to 2021, we show that having female directors leads to more environmental-friendly business operations. To establish the causal effect, we resort to plausibly exogenous variations in the share of female directors and a California law change.

We show that neither board qualifications nor standard diversity measures supersede the share of female directors in explaining corporate environmental performance, suggesting that director gender is likely a holistic measure of female directors’ values and perspectives, and that female directors contribute to diversity of thought. Our findings highlight positive externalities among firms’ environmental, social, and governance engagement.

Authors

Real name:
Po-Hsuan Hsu
Real name:
Research Member
UBC Sauder School of Business
Real name:
Yihui Pan