Do Female Directors Raise ESG Ratings? A Meta-Analysis

Karolina Hozova (), Tomas Havranek and Zuzana Irsova
Additional contact information
Karolina Hozova: Institute of Economic Studies, Charles University, Prague

No 2026/25, Working Papers IES from Charles University Prague, Faculty of Social Sciences, Institute of Economic Studies

Abstract: Appointing more women to corporate boards is widely expected to also raise firms´ environmental, social, and governance (ESG) performance. We provide the first meta-analysis of this relationship, drawing on 533 estimates from 106 studies that measure ESG performance with Bloomberg or LSEG ratings. The average reported effect of a one-percentage-point increase in board gender diversity is about 0.28 ESG points, but much of it does not survive scrutiny. Correcting for publication bias with a battery of linear and non-linear methods lowers the effect to between roughly 0.08 and 0.17 points. A best-practice estimate that also imposes sound study design puts it near 0.12 for most of the world, markedly higher for the Middle East, and near −0.11 for the Southeast Asian markets that dominate the Asian evidence. The differences that remain across studies are systematic, driven mainly by geography and by the choice of estimation method rather than by the ESG-rating provider or the controls a study includes. Board gender diversity may be well worth pursuing on its own merits, but the evidence that it reliably raises ESG scores is weaker than the published record suggests.

Keywords: board gender diversity; ESG ratings; meta-analysis; publication bias; Bayesian model averaging (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C83 G34 J16 M14 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 44 pages
Date: 2026-09, Revised 2026-09
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://ies.fsv.cuni.cz/en/do-female-directors-raise-esg-ratings-meta-analysis (application/pdf)

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:fau:wpaper:wp2026_25

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers IES from Charles University Prague, Faculty of Social Sciences, Institute of Economic Studies Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Natalie Svarcova ().