Companies led by women tend to make more environmentally friendly decisions, according to researchers at the School of Management at Northwestern Polytechnical University in Xi’an, China.
Companies with female leaders tend to have “greater concern for stakeholders and social reflection,” which lead them to make policy decisions that favor reducing emissions of waste gas, wastewater, waste residues and greenhouse gasses, contend the authors of an analysis of 351 Chinese publicly traded companies in highly polluting industries from 2006 to 2019 published Wednesday in Corporate Social Responsibility and Environmental Management.
The power of women corporate environmental policy leaders is not to be underestimated, according to authors Ying Zhang, Yuting Guo and Aiman Nurdazym.
Drawing on traditional attributes of women — communal qualities such as helpfulness, nurturance and kindness — the authors said, “when women enter management, such traits will lead them to favor altruistic and ethics related strategies, which are reflected in a greater concern for stakeholders and social reflection.”
“Unsustainable corporate environmental policies can damage relationships with stake-
holders and hinder the development or maintenance of long-term relationships with communities,” they added.
It might behoove board directors to promote women to executive positions to improve their corporate sustainable environmental policies, the authors suggested. Admittedly, they said, their research had limitations.
“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,” they said. “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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