The Impact of Women Top Managers and Directors on Corporate Environmental Performance

Abstract

This paper contributes to theory on the impact of leader attributes on corporate behavior by exploring the relationship between gender composition in corporate leadership and environmental performance. Specifically, using a sample of 500 large US firms we examine a) the effects of women leadership on corporate environmental performance in general, b) the relative magnitude of these effects across the categories of women management and women board members, and c) the extent to which the impact of women in leadership exhibits threshold effects. We find that firms that incorporate women in their top management team and board of directors exhibit superior environmental performance, with the impact being greater for the board. Furthermore, the addition of women to a firm’s top management only impacts its environmental performance if the firm also has women on its board of directors. We discuss how these results contribute to research on upper echelons in general and female leadership of large corporations specifically.