Gender Diversity and Environmental Performance: New Evidence from China

Abstract

Although existing work has found that increased director gender diversity can help improve corporate environmental performance, few of them tried to examine whether this improvement is affected by the degree of gender diversity and ownership structure. Using data on Chinese listed companies, this paper contributes to prior work by investigating the extent to which the degree of gender diversity and ownership structure affect the improvement. The findings are twofold: On the one hand, as the proportion of female directors increases, the improvements they bring to firms’ environmental performance fade gradually. On the other hand, the relationship between director gender diversity and a firm’s environmental performance is stronger in state-owned enterprises. The results of this paper have theoretical and practical implications and the results keep steady after a series of econometric tests. We also interpret our findings by relying on insights from different theories (i.e., agency, resource dependence, token hire and ownership theories).