Board gender diversity and environmental responsibility performance

In this paper, I analyze the impact of board gender diversity on firms’ environmental pillar score. This paper contributes to existing literature by conducting the research using a more precise measure, environmental pillar score, to analyze the environmental facets of corporate responsibility. I conduct the research using data of European public firms from 2009 to 2020 and form a final sample of 3219 firm-year observations. I find a positive relationship between board gender diversity and environmental performance, and I also find that the positive effect is only significant if there is more than one female board member. Thereby the results suggest that appointing only one “token” woman on the board to avoid all-male panels is not beneficial for the firm. Additionally, I test the relationship between environmental and financial performance, but the results are insignificant. All the results in this study stay consistent even after robustness checks and additional analysis