This paper examines whether women’s attitudes toward environmental innovation are impacted by their individual differences in skills, expertise, experience, and technical knowledge, as well as their visibility and legitimacy on boards. Using the categorization of directors developed by Hillman et al (J Manag Stud 37(2):235–256, 2000) and a dataset including the largest non-financial Spanish-listed entities reported on the IBEX-35 between 2015 and 2019, we can confirm the influence of female business expert and support specialist directors on environmental innovation. We find that although female business expert directors seem to positively influence environmental innovation even below a critical mass, female support specialist directors are only significant and positive drivers of eco-initiation when they gain power and authority on the board. This study confirms the need to examine the connection between women directors and eco-innovation based not only on their expertise and experience but also on their position and legitimacy on the board. In this regard, our results provide evidence that female support specialists need to have a large enough representation on boards to be effective in developing green initiatives. Our results are robust to alternative measures of green innovation (i.e., environmental performance) and overcome endogeneity concerns.

Este estudio tiene por finalidad analizar si el compromiso con la transparencia informativa en materia de objetivos de desarrollo sostenible (ODS) guarda relación con la presencia de mujeres en los órganos de control y de gestión. Dicho objetivo es examinado para una muestra de 145 empresas españolas para el periodo 2015-2019. La evidencia obtenida pone de manifiesto que en la empresa española la diversidad de género en los consejos de administración y equipos directivos ejerce un papel clave en el compromiso con la transparencia de las actuaciones en materia de ODS.

For the period 2015–2019 and based on a Spanish sample of 145 listed companies, this paper provides insights into how narcissistic chief executive officers (CEOs) influence the proportion of women in top management teams (TMTs). As a further analysis and in line with social psychology and upper echelons theories, we study whether the power and gender of a CEO and the female proportion in the firm's board moderate the relationship. Our results reveal that narcissistic CEOs are less likely to support women in TMTs, confirming that CEO personality traits influence team structure. Further results suggest that this aversion increases as the CEO's power grows and is a woman, and when female proportion in board decreases. The results have an impact on the gender equality goal, demonstrating that the behavior of women toward promoting gender equality in TMTs depends both on the specific position of women in the firm's hierarchy and on their personal psychological attributes. We find that women directors support social identity values and that narcissistic female CEOs act like queen bees.