Female CEOs and Green Innovation in Family Firms: Promoting or Inhibiting?

Ping Guo, Yijun Liu, Jiannan Yu and Yanyan Chen

Business Strategy and the Environment, 2025, vol. 34, issue 7, 9059-9080

Abstract: Green innovation involves both environmental protection and significant risk, posing a strategic challenge for top management. Existing research provides inconclusive evidence on the influence of executive gender on green innovation, particularly within family firms. Drawing on role congruity theory and socioemotional wealth theory, this study investigates the impact of female CEOs on green innovation in Chinese listed family firms from 2010 to 2021. Employing OLS regressions with year and industry fixed effects, we demonstrate that female CEOs inhibit green innovation compared to male counterparts. This finding remains robust after addressing endogeneity through propensity score matching, instrumental variable methods, and difference‐in‐differences estimation, as well as after various robustness tests. Female leadership representation, family control, and male offspring involvement mitigate this negative relationship, while regional gender inequality exacerbates it. Notably, the inhibitory effect disappears when family control exceeds 55%. Furthermore, female CEOs tend to substitute green innovation with corporate social responsibility activities. Our study expands the understanding of the boundary conditions for female leadership decisions and provides empirical insights into the role of female executives in shaping sustainable development in family firms.

Date: 2025
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