Abstract
While prior studies have investigated the impact of corporate governance mechanisms on corporate social responsibility (CSR) commitment, researchers have scantly studied the potentially important relationship between board gender diversity and corporate social responsibility and irresponsibilityseparately. Drawing on the social role theory and feminist ethics, we hypothesizethat board gender diversity is positively associated with CSR and negatively associated with corporate social irresponsibility (CSI).Here, we relied on a sample of French non-financial companies listed on the SBF 120 index between 2011 and 2016. Our results provide evidence on the positive impact of board gender diversity on CSR and the negative one on CSI. We show that women have a stronger impact on reducing CSI than on enhancing CSR. Our findings were robust to the different estimation methods.
Highlights
The global financial crisis and the succession of financial scandals have shaken confidence in large companies and have revived debates on corporate social responsibility (CSR) and corporate governance [1,2]
The present study extends the literature on the role of board gender diversity and on its impact on Corporate social performance (CSP)
It does investigate whether board gender diversity has an impact on CSP and whether it brings different perspectives to boards and, demonstrate that its effect may depend on the different corporate social practices while distinguishing corporate social responsibility and irresponsibility
Summary
The global financial crisis and the succession of financial scandals have shaken confidence in large companies and have revived debates on corporate social responsibility (CSR) and corporate governance [1,2]. A strand of literature has examined the link between the various governance mechanisms, the characteristics linked to the board of directors and corporate performance in terms of CSR. The majority of studies find that gender diversity on the board is likely to have a positive influence on corporate social performance [11], others show that its effect could be limited or even negative [12,13,14]. Researchers have only recently begun to broaden their understanding of the impact of gender diversity on boards of directors on CSR activities through the inclusion of CSI. The present work aimed to explore the impact of women’s participation on boards of directors on the corporate social performance of French companies.
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