Gender of firm leadership and environmental, social and governance (ESG) reporting: evidence from banks listed on Ghana Stock Exchange
Abstract
Purpose
This study aims to examine how woman corporate leadership indicators and environmental, social and governance (ESG) disclosure in listed banks on Ghana Stock Exchange are related.
Design/methodology/approach
Data was obtained from the audited annual reports of the banks for the period 2006–2020. Empirical result estimation was achieved using Panel Corrected Standard Errors.
Findings
The result revealed that female chief executive officer (CEO), female board chairperson and board gender diversity are associated with higher disclosure of ESG issues in listed banks in Ghana in overall terms. However, in terms of individual disclosures, female board chairperson positively impacts social disclosure, whereas both female CEO and female board chairperson affect governance disclosure positively.
Research limitations/implications
In this era of business where there is much emphasis on green business and investment by various stakeholders for purposes of ensuring business legitimacy, the result implies that banks must consider females to occupy the positions of CEO and board chairperson since that can help to improve ESG performance of banks.
Practical implications
In this era of business where there is much emphasis on green business, socially responsible investment and impact investment by various stakeholders, the result implies that banks must consider improving the representation of women in leadership since that can help to improve ESG performance of banks and hence ability to attract more investors.
Originality/value
To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to provide empirical evidence from a developing country perspective in Sub-Saharan Africa that gender of bank leadership has implications for ESG disclosure.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
The authors express their profound gratitude to the Editor, Dr Adelina Broadbridge, the Editorial team and the two anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments, suggestions and guidance that have given the paper its current quality.
Funding statement: The authors received no funding or financial assistance for the development of the manuscript.
Data availability statement: The data used for empirical analysis was obtained from publicly available documents.
Conflict of interest disclosure: The authors declare that there are no issues of conflict of interest pertaining to this manuscript.
Ethics approval statement: All ethical issues were adhered to.
Citation
Luh, P.K., Arthur, M., Fiador, V. and Kusi, B.A.A. (2024), "Gender of firm leadership and environmental, social and governance (ESG) reporting: evidence from banks listed on Ghana Stock Exchange", Gender in Management, Vol. ahead-of-print No. ahead-of-print. https://doi.org/10.1108/GM-03-2023-0110
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
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