Are the queens green?: Corporate executive gender and the environmental performance of the firm

Justin Roush (), Mina Lee () and Seung-Hyun Lee ()
Additional contact information
Justin Roush: Xavier University
Mina Lee: Xavier University
Seung-Hyun Lee: University of Texas at Dallas

Journal of Economics and Finance, 2025, vol. 49, issue 1, No 10, 225-247

Abstract: Abstract This paper considers the relationship between changes in corporate executive gender and the environmental performance of the firm. We build a detailed facility-level panel dataset that captures annual facility emissions and parent-firm executive characteristics from 2011 through 2018. We study pounds emitted, emissions toxicity, and emissions damages. We find that increasing proportions of female executives at firms relate to better environmental performance. A 0.2 percentage point increase in the proportion of female executives correlates to 7.1% lower toxicity-weighted emissions; 70.5% of this difference is explained by lower emissions toxicity while the rest is due to reduced volume of emissions. This suggests executive teams with higher proportions of females relate to cleaner firms by way of cleaner inputs or better emissions transformation practices (e.g., incineration, gasification, or pyrolysis), not just reduced emissions volume. Finally, we find no impact of CEO gender alone on facility emissions.

Keywords: Emissions; Gender; Corporate governance; Female executive; Sustainability (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J16 M12 Q53 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s12197-025-09707-z Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:jecfin:v:49:y:2025:i:1:d:10.1007_s12197-025-09707-z

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... cs/journal/12197/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s12197-025-09707-z

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Economics and Finance is currently edited by James Payne

More articles in Journal of Economics and Finance from Springer, Academy of Economics and Finance Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().