Females’ social responsibility: the impact of female executives on ESG performance

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the impact mechanism of the proportion of female executives on ESG investment. The results show that when female executives play a greater role in management, ESG performance improves. This effect is an inverted U-shape, and the critical point is approximately 33%. Female executives have significantly promoted the digitization of enterprises, which is an important mechanism for explaining the improvement of ESG performance.

KEYWORDS:

• ESG
• female executives
• nonlinear relationship
• digitization

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• J16
• D21
• M14

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the China Postdoctoral Science Foundation [2022M720335]