Resumo

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) and diversity in workforce have become increasingly important managerial concepts. Globalization, demographic changes, and an increase in the power of corporations encouraged changes in the way corporations interact with society, which pushed organizations to put both CSR and diversity management onto their agenda. Literature has shown that the composition of the board of directors (BD) and board of executives (BE), is a key feature in determining the CSR practices. Among BD and BE characteristics, one of the most relevant is its gender diversity.

Considering the possible link between women participation on BE and BD and a better CSR performance. Also, considering the ongoing debate of gender diversity senior corporate positions, and its relevance, especially in emerging countries, in this research we aim to investigate the effect that women representation on BE and BD may have on environmental CSR practices of Brazilian companies.

Based on the assumptions of the resource dependence theory and the theoretical discussion about the effect of gender diversity on companies’ performance, we expect that the unique female background contribute to increase board’s decision quality and, by doing that, CSR practices also undergo improvements. Therefore, our study’s hypothesis states that the percentage of women on the board of directors and executives positively influences the companies’ engagement in environmental practices of CSR.

We used a sample of 96 Brazilian companies from Brasil, Bolsa, Balcão (B3), ranging from 2010 to 2018, making up for 627 observations. Our proxies for engagement in environmental CSR practices, were collected from CSRHub database. There are three categories under environmental dimension in this database that we used as dependent variables: Energy & Climate Change, and Resource Management. In order to analyze the impact of women presence on BE and BD we employed several two-stage regression models.

Our results show that the presence of women on BE and BD, as well as a higher percentage of women on both boards, boost environmental engagement. We found that BE with women showed higher averages of environmental disclosure and engaged more in practices against climate change. A greater percentage of women in this board positively influenced all three forms of environmental engagement. The presence of women on the BD increased the engagement in practices that tackle climate change, and a higher percentage of women had a positive influence on environmental disclosure as well.

The research goes deeper into the relationship between governance characteristics and engagement in CSR practices. This is due to the fact of investigating the influence of the gender diversity in top management on three proxies that seek to reflect different aspects of environmental engagement aspects of environmental engagement. Our results also imply that even though BD is more scrutinized in the literature that relates corporate governance and CSR, women on BE may bear more importance in improving environmental CSR practices of Brazilian companies.

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