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While the economic literature mostly tackled discrimination looking at labour costs, this work focuses on its relation to labour productivity, arguing that discrimination may worsen the performance of female employees. In this view, it represents a source of allocative inefficiency, which contributes to reducing output.

Female discrimination is both a social and an economic problem. In social terms, consolidated gender stereotypes impose constraints on women’s behaviour, worsening their overall well-being. In economic terms, women face generally worse labour market conditions. Using long-run Italian data spanning from 1861 to 2009, the authors propose a novel measure of female discrimination based on the observed frequency of discriminating epithets. Following social capital theory, the authors distinguish between structural and voluntary discrimination, and use Data Envelopment Analysis for time series data to assess the extent of inefficiency that each component of discrimination induces in the production process.

The results draw the trajectory of female discrimination in Italy and provide evidence in favour of the idea that female discrimination reduces productive efficiency. In particular, the structural component of female discrimination, although less sizeable than the voluntary component, plays a major role, especially in recent years, where more stringent beauty standards fuel looks-based discrimination.

The contribution of this work is twofold. First, based on contributions from social sciences different from economics, it proposes a novel theoretical framework that explores the effect of discriminatory language on labour productivity. Second, it introduces a novel and direct measure of female discrimination at the country level, based on the bidirectional link between language and culture. The indicator is easily understood by policymakers and may be used to evaluate the effectiveness of anti-discrimination policies.

In recent years, European banks have been required to integrate environmental and social objectives into their business practices. At the same time, they have become increasingly exposed to environmental, social and governance (ESG) controversies. This paper empirically examines the relationship between the board characteristics of banks (i.e. size, gender diversity, meeting frequency, sustainability compensation incentives and the presence of a sustainability committee) and exposure to ESG-related controversies.

The empirical analysis focuses on a sample of 61 European banks between 2012 and 2021. Employing generalized method of moments (GMM) estimation, the authors examine the relationship between board characteristics and ESG controversies.

The results of the study indicate that banks featuring certain board characteristics (i.e. larger and more gender-diverse boards, facing sustainability compensation provisions and having sustainability committees) experience lesser exposure to ESG controversies. Additionally, the authors ascertain that prior instances of ESG controversies play a role in influencing current levels of such controversies. This result highlights the relevance of a bank's historical trajectory.

The authors' sample contains banks based in the European Union (EU). Future research should broaden the analysis to encompass banks operating in other advanced countries, as well as in emerging countries. This expansion would offer more insights into the relationship between board characteristics and ESG controversies under different regulatory frameworks.

The authors' findings provide relevant implications for several stakeholders, including shareholders, regulators and supervisors. Certain board characteristics should be taken into consideration to limit exposure to ESG controversies.

To the best of the authors' knowledge, this paper represents the first attempt to provide evidence of the link between strong corporate governance standards and reduced exposure to ESG controversies.