Certification to compensate gender prejudice – Analysis on impact of management system certification on export

ABSTRACT

Management system certification signals that the organization meets international standards, which provides a certain confidence in the company. This confidence is in particular needed for exporting companies in developing countries. Because the business world is dominated by men, female leadership might be another reason to have less confidence in a company. Women-led companies may therefore benefit more from certification. Therefore, this study empirically tests the impact of certification on export, and the moderating effect of female leadership. We use data from enterprise surveys conducted by the World Bank in 2013 that include 4111 firms from 25 Central and Eastern European countries in transition. We implement a recursive bivariate probit model and an extensive sensitivity analysis to account for endogeneity issues. Results confirm that certification and export are positively correlated. Firms managed by females benefit more from certification based on international standards than firms managed by men, especially in the service sector. This suggests that certification compensates for the possibly negative connotations of female leadership. Female managers may consider implementing a management system and get it certified, resulting in a competitive advantage in export markets. Our findings provide food for thought for purchase managers – are they free from prejudice?

KEYWORDS:

• Management system certification
• export
• World Bank enterprise survey
• gender prejudice

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• J16
• L15
• F10

Acknowledgments

Authors appreciate the feedbacks of the participants at the EURAS 2016 Annual Standardisation Conference in Montpellier, France, 29 June – 1 July 2016 and at the EURAS 2021 (virtual) Annual Standardisation Conference 6–9 September 2021, Aachen, Germany. Authors would also like to thank anonymous referees and editors for their careful and constructive reviews. Cesare A.F. Riillo gratefully acknowledges the support of the Observatoire de la Compétitivité, Ministère de l’Economie, DG Compétitivité, Luxembourg, and STATEC, the National Statistical Institute of Luxembourg. Views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not reflect those of STATEC or STATEC Research and funding partners.

Disclosure statement

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

Authors’ Contributions

CR was responsible for econometric analysis, figures, study design, literature search, data collection and writing; IM for study design, literature search, data collection, and writing; HdV for literature search, study design, and writing.

Notes

¹ A sport analogy can help to better understand our conceptual model: Sport is good for health (H1); being overweighed is not good for health (H2). Overweighed people are less likely to do sport (H3), but overweighed people that actually do sports, benefit more than others in terms of heath (H4).

² Strictly speaking, the sentence should read ‘Interviewer: if there is need for clarification, some examples are: ISO 9001 or 14,001, or HACCP’. We faithfully report the wording in Figure 2.

Figure 2. Wording of the certification question (Enterprise Surveys 2014. pag. 103).

³ The ISO Survey 2013 reports that 7186 Hungarian firms were ISO-9001-certified, 1955 had a certified environmental management system based on the international standard ISO 14001, and 472 a certificate based on the standard for information security management ISO/IEC 27001 (see https://isotc.iso.org/livelink/livelink?func=ll&objId=20719433&objAction=browse&viewType=1)

In 2013, 349,587 firms were active in Hungary (see Eurostat table bd_9fh_sz_cl_r2. Employer business demography by size class (from 2004 onwards, NACE Rev. 2) available http://appsso.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/nui/show.do?wai=true&dataset=bd_9fh_sz_cl_r2

⁴ CEM is successfully implemented in many research fields including innovation studies (Aggarwal and Hsu 2014; Huwei and Zhao (2020), environmental research (Riillo, 2017), and survey methodology (Sarracino, Riillo, and Mikucka 2017; Schork, Riillo, and Neumayr 2021).