According to researchers at the School of Management at Northwestern Polytechnical University in Xi’an, China, companies led by women CEOs tend to make business decisions that are more environmentally friendly.
As per the analysis that was published in Corporate Social Responsibility and Environmental Management, corporate female leaders tend to show ‘greater concern for stakeholders and social reflection’ allowing them to make policy decisions that favoured towards reducing environment-deteriorating elements like emissions of waste gas, wastewater, waste residues and greenhouse gasses.
The authors Ying Zhang, Yuting Guo and Aiman Nurdazym, analysed 351 Chinese publicly traded companies in highly polluting industries from 2006 to 2019. As per the authors, it’s the more traditional attributes which women possess, which pushes them to take steps towards a more conscious approach. They said- ‘when women enter management, such traits will lead them to favour altruistic and ethics related strategies, which are reflected in a greater concern for stakeholders and social reflection.’ They went on to add how unsustainable corporate environmental policies can damage relationships with stake-holders and hinder the development or maintenance of long-term relationships with communities.
While the authors, through their analysis offered great insight into these gender-based findings, they did admit to limitations in their research as well. They said, “Although we propose that female CEOs are positively associated with corporate sustainable environmental policies, data limitations have prevented us from directly measuring the underlying mechanisms. Future studies can further strengthen our arguments and empirical tests by conducting surveys and experiments to explore and measure this underlying mechanism or by finding better boundary conditions.”
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