The Eco-Gender Gap in Boardrooms

To examine what women bring to the boardroom table, we first show a significant gender gap in viewing the tradeoff between environmental and economic benefits, using the Gallup Poll. We next demonstrate that such a gender gap extends into boardrooms. Having female directors is associated with more environmentally friendly business operations, but also with higher investment in environmental protection at the same time. Results from an analysis using a California law change that imposed board gender quotas point to a potentially causal effect of female directors. Employing a rich set of director demographics and board characteristics, we show that none consistently supersedes the share of female directors in explaining corporate environmental performance, suggesting that female directors play a unique role in explaining firms’ investment in environmental protection. This paper was accepted by Caroline Flammer, sustainability. Funding: P.-H. Hsu acknowledges the Yushan Fellow Program by the Ministry of Education and the National Science and Technology Council, Taiwan [Grants MOE-108-YSFMS-0004-012-P1 and NSTC 113-2410-H-007-008-MY3], the Mack Institute for Innovation Management at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, and the E.SUN Academic Award for financial and research support. K. Li received financial support from the Canada Research Chair in Corporate Governance, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada [Grant 435-2022-0285], and the Montalbano Centre for Responsible Leadership Development at UBC Sauder School of Business. Supplemental Material: The online appendix and data files are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2024.07730 .