Walking the Talk? A Corporate Governance Perspective on Corporate Social Responsibility Decoupling

Abstract Information asymmetry and the pressure to conform to stakeholders’ expectations cause firms to engage in corporate social responsibility (CSR) decoupling – a practice that has severe socioeconomic consequences for firms. Adopting a corporate governance perspective, this paper answers a novel question: whether board gender diversity (BGD) curbs CSR decoupling. Using a battery of sophisticated analyses and robustness tests on 9276 firm‐year observations for the period 2002–2017, our results confirm that BGD is negatively associated with CSR decoupling. Analysis of the composition of gender‐diverse boards further reveals that this effect is stronger for balanced boards than for skewed and tilted boards. Furthermore, we note that independent female directors are more effective monitors of decoupling than executive female directors. We also document that the relationship between BGD and CSR decoupling is stronger when the overall governance is weak. This implies that gender‐diverse boards could act as a substitute mechanism for corporate governance that would otherwise be weak. Our study offers important theoretical and policy implications for the field of corporate governance and CSR.