Banks’ CSR reporting – Do women have a say?

Abstract

Purpose

This paper aims to determine the association between corporate social responsibility (CSR) reporting of listed banks and female representation on boards while controlling for the impact of gender quotas.

Design/methodology/approach

Logistic regressions are used with bank fixed effects on a global sample of 285 commercial banks from 2005 to 2017.

Findings

There exists a positive association between the proportion of women on board and banks’ CSR disclosure. Positive association remains also after quota corrections for banks with either below- or above-quota female representation. Further, adding more women to boards than required by quota could affect boards’ CSR reporting in masculine countries but not in feminine countries.

Research limitations/implications

The results are not generalizable to smaller listed banks and the used estimation approach does not enable to detect causality.

Practical implications

Policymakers interested in improving banks’ CSR reporting could introduce gender quotas.

Social implications

Gender quotas can enforce banks’ sustainable behaviour.

Originality/value

First, it is the first study to thoroughly control for gender quotas while investigating the association between female representation on boards and CSR disclosure. Second, this paper moves forward from the so-far predominant concentration on single-country studies on banks’ CSR reporting. Third, this paper covers the aspect of a country’s masculinity-femininity as a factor that could influence the association between CSR disclosure and female representation.

Citation

Tapver, T., Laidroo, L. and Gurvitš-Suits, N.A. (2020), "Banks’ CSR reporting – Do women have a say?", Corporate Governance, Vol. 20 No. 4, pp. 639-651. https://doi.org/10.1108/CG-11-2019-0338