Abstract:

Despite sustained policy advocacy and expanding scholarship positioning women’s leadership as a catalyst for corporate sustainability, empirical evidence linking board gender diversity to ESG outcomes remains theoretically ambiguous and empirically inconsistent. Synthesising 67 studies on women’s leadership and environmental, social, and governance performance, this review demonstrates that sustainability outcomes cannot be explained by representation alone but are contingent upon positional authority, governance integration, and institutional alignment.

While women’s leadership is consistently associated with enhanced ESG disclosure, stakeholder responsiveness, and governance transparency, its influence on substantive environmental transformation—such as emissions reduction and sustainability investment remains conditional and uneven. Emerging causal reassessments further challenge prevailing assumptions, suggesting that leadership diversity may often reflect pre-existing organisational sustainability orientations rather than acting as an independent driver of change.

Integrating insights across governance roles, measurement regimes, and institutional contexts, this review advances a reconceptualization of gender diversity as a structurally embedded governance capability rather than a demographic attribute. In doing so, it distinguishes between sustainability visibility and sustainability transformation, demonstrating how institutional architectures, competitive pressures, and socio-cultural norms shape the translation of leadership diversity into operational outcomes.

Building on these insights, the paper develops a future research agenda focused on resolving causal endogeneity, operationalising governance power, reconnecting ESG transparency with material performance, and theorising the institutional boundary conditions under which leadership diversity produces substantive sustainability change.

By reframing women’s leadership within the broader architecture of corporate governance systems, this review moves beyond representation-based narratives and offers a theoretically grounded foundation for advancing research on board diversity and corporate sustainability.

Please choose your submission type: Full Paper

Primary Track: Sustainable and Responsible Business

Keywords: responsible business;leadership/management development;PRME;CSR;secondary research/concept paper

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Mr. Paul Watson