Technowomen: Women’s Autonomy and Its Impact on Environmental Quality

Saima Mujeed,Abdelmohsen A Nassani,Muhammad Moinuddin Qazi Abro,Shuangyan Li,Sriyanto Sriyanto,Hanifah Jambari,Sameh E Askar,Khalid Zaman,Musarrat Jabeen

doi:10.3390/su13041611

Abstract

The role of women in economic development and the global environment is vital for progressing them towards the United Nations sustainable development goal (SDG-5) that emphasized the need to empower women in every walk of life. The study examines women’s autonomy in the sustainable development agenda under China’s open innovation system from 1975 to 2019. The study employed an autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) model, vector autoregressive (VAR) Granger causality, and innovation accounting matrix to estimate parameters. The existing data are summarized and collated in the context of China to explain as a correlational study. The results show that women’s autonomy moderated with technology spills over to decrease greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and substantiate the hump-shaped relationship between them. The increased spending on research and development (R&D) activities, patent publications, and renewable energy consumption empowers women to be equipped with the latest sustainable technologies to improve environmental quality. The pollution haven hypothesis verifies a given country, where trade liberalization policies tend to increase polluting industries to set up their plants that engaged in dirty production that exacerbate GHG emissions. The causality estimates confirmed that technological innovations and renewable energy consumption leads to women’s autonomy. In contrast, females’ share in the labor force participation rate leads to an increase in renewable energy consumption. Thus, it is evident that there is a positive role of women in the country’s sustainable development.

Highlights

An increasing share of females’ share in labor force participation rate and renewable energy consumption decreases greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions with correlation coefficient values of r = −0.982 p < 0.000 and r = −0.983 p < 0.000, respectively. It is evident from the correlation results that women’s autonomy increases by open innovation factors, i.e., there is a positive correlation of patent applications (r = 0.815 p < 0.000) and research and development (R&D) expenditures (r = 0.958 p < 0.000) with women’s autonomy
Patent applications increase by an increase in R&D expenditures and trade openness, whereas R&D expenditures increase by trade openness
The results show that the more significant variance shocks of females’ share in labor force participation rate will exert on GHG emissions with a percentage share of 33.141%, followed by renewable energy consumption, i.e., 12.310%; R&D expenditures, i.e., 10.461%; women’s autonomy, i.e., 9.122%; and trade openness, i.e., 5.021%

Summary

Introduction

Gender equality is one of the vital aspects of the United Nations sustainable development goals (SDG-5) that provoked the need to end all forms of gender discrimination in socio-economic and business spheres. The United Nations stressed the importance of ensuring universal access to education, health, and reproductive rights of the women that enable them to shared 4.0/). Sustainability 2021, 13, x FOR PEER REVIEW. Sustainability 2021, 13, 1611 education, health, and reproductive rights of the women that enable them to shared household household and and family family responsibilities responsibilities and and make make their their roles roles in in the the economic economic system. InforInformation and communications technologies (ICTs) help spread the network of technological mation and communications technologies grids grids across across countries countries while it it quickly quickly allows allows women to to get get empowered empowered through enabling technology technology [1]

Results

Discussion

Conclusion