TY - JOUR AB - Purpose This paper aims to analyze the influence of gender diversity on the relationship between corporate social responsibility (CSR), corporate governance (CG) and economic and financial performance of Brazilian publicly traded companies.Design/methodology/approach The sample comprises 68 non-financial public companies comprising the IBX100 index of BM&FBOVESPA. For that, it was used panel data modeling, correlation and ranking by TOPSIS method.Findings The results suggest a significant relationship between CG and economic–financial performance when mediated by gender diversity. This relationship was not observed between CSR and economic–financial performance. Thus, it can be concluded that in a diversified board of directors, in terms of gender, better monitoring of managers can occur because of the increase in their independence in decisions, as well as performance increase. These results diverge from the literature on the influence of women’s participation in corporate boards in CSR. It is assumed that this result is because of the fact that the participation of women is recent in Brazil.Research limitations/implications The main limitations are the number of companies analyzed, the choice of ISE index to verify the CSR variable and the metric used to verify the CG mechanisms.Originality/value In general, this research contributes to the literature of the area, especially in Brazil, in confirming that the mediating variable gender diversity makes the relationship between CG and performance more significant. VL - 54 IS - 2 SN - 2531-0488 DO - 10.1108/RAUSP-07-2018-0041 UR - https://doi.org/10.1108/RAUSP-07-2018-0041 AU - Dani Andreia Carpes AU - Picolo Jaime Dagostim AU - Klann Roberto Carlos PY - 2018 Y1 - 2018/01/01 TI - Gender influence, social responsibility and governance in performance T2 - RAUSP Management Journal PB - Emerald Publishing Limited SP - 154 EP - 177 Y2 - 2024/04/24 ER -