Encouraging environmental sustainability through gender:Amicro‐foundational approach using linguistic gender marking

Abstract

While studies show that organizational diversity is beneficial to their practice of environmental sustainability, we know very little about the effect that the gender of an individual director can have on sustainability practice. In this empirical paper, we employ a micro-foundational approach to examine whether the number of women on an organization's board of directors has a direct effect on its attitude towards environmental sustainability, regardless of the national culture in which the organization is located. Culture in this study is measured through grammatical gender marking, a unique approach to measuring women-oriented cultural effects. Previous studies show that certain cultures have more gender roles than others do, which in turn affect general and organizational behavior in that society. Grammatical gender marking enables us to study the impact of gender of the individual director on the organization's attitude towards environmental sustainability across cultures, by empirically examining data from 71 countries, sampling 4500 organizations for multiple years and industries. Our findings show that organizations become significantly more proactive in environmental sustainability with the appointment of even one woman to the board of directors, regardless of the local culture. We further show that the organization's level of disclosure regarding its sustainability activities increases with the number of women on the board of directors. Our data also show a significantly negative relationship between various gender-based language indices and the presence of women on the board of directors. In cultures defined by a language that has clear grammatical gender markings, there is a tendency to appoint fewer women to boards of directors, thereby influencing indirectly the organization's attitude towards environmental sustainability.

Corporate governance and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender‐supportive human resource policies from corporate social responsibility, resource‐based, and agency perspectives

“…Pichler et al (2018) conducted supplemental analyses using a t − 1 changes specification of their model and by testing causality on the basis of temporal precedence. In contrast, we use the instrumental variable (IV) regression 4 method, which is a robust estimation method used in economics, finance, and management research (e.g., Angrist & Krueger, 1991;Bazel-Shoham, Lee, Rivera, & Shoham, 2017;Shoham, Almor, Lee, & Ahammad, 2017), to examine the causal relationships predicted in Hypotheses 1 and 2. A good IV introduces random variation to mimic randomization in an experimental study design.…”

Disrupting the Status-Quo of Organisational Board Composition to Improve Sustainability Outcomes: Reviewing the Evidence

“…Mahmood et al [27] demonstrate the value of qualitative methods in the nuance they reveal in how diversity on boards can vary in different situations. Shoham et al [29] apply a mixed methods approach to collecting data on the influence of board composition on sustainability performance, using interviews with board directors to inform their interpretations of the quantitative results. Cuadrado-Ballesteros et al [33] employ a qualitative comparative analysis, which is predominantly a quantitative assessment of the relationship between the variables under investigation.…”

“…Fakoyo and Nakeng [28] highlight policy as an important enabling factor for the integration of diversity onto boards in their South African study, while Fernandez-Feijoo et al [26] note the importance of policy when they show a significant negative relationship between the proportion of women on company boards and a country's relative gender equality. Yet the positive impact of women on boards continues to be highlighted no matter the cultural context (Shoham et al [29]). Other scholars have investigated the difference that diversity on boards can have according to industry.…”

“…Standard means of calculating gender include the percentage or proportion of females on a board, or employing Blau's diversity index [23,24,32,37,40,42,43,[49][50][51]. Shoham et al [29] offer one of few studies to consider the implications of using binary language, in particular masculine language, in the recruitment of women to company boards. They explore how grammatical gender markings work to reinforce binaries and how this might influence the appointment of women onto a board and the relationship to environmental sustainability.…”

“…Nadeem et al [40] use Bloomberg's ESG score to measure sustainability disclosure and include the environmental categories: water consumption, energy use, wastes management and greenhouse gas emissions. However, the availability of relevant corporate environmental and social information was frequently noted as a major challenge for researchers [22,29,37,57].…”