Are the queens green?: Corporate executive gender and the environmental performance of the firm

This paper considers the relationship between changes in corporate executive gender and the environmental performance of the firm. We build a detailed facility-level panel dataset that captures annual facility emissions and parent-firm executive characteristics from 2011 through 2018. We study pounds emitted, emissions toxicity, and emissions damages. We find that increasing proportions of female executives at firms relate to better environmental performance. A 0.2 percentage point increase in the proportion of female executives correlates to 7.1% lower toxicity-weighted emissions; 70.5% of this difference is explained by lower emissions toxicity while the rest is due to reduced volume of emissions. This suggests executive teams with higher proportions of females relate to cleaner firms by way of cleaner inputs or better emissions transformation practices (e.g., incineration, gasification, or pyrolysis), not just reduced emissions volume. Finally, we find no impact of CEO gender alone on facility emissions.