Board Gender Diversity and the Environmental Performance of European Firms

Environmental performance has become a critical dimension of corporate sus-tainability, reflecting firms’ ability to mitigate their impact on the environmental. This study aims to explores the role of board gender diversity in enhancing the envi-ronmental performance among the European firms. A panel dataset of 19,311 firm-year observations from 2011 to 2022 integrated from EU ETS and ORBIS. This data used to evaluates two key indicators of environmental performance: CO₂ emissions and emissions per employee. Two multiple regression models are employed to cap-ture both total environmental impact and environmental efficiency. The results demonstrate that gender diversity in the boardroom significantly im-proves environmental performance. Firms with higher proportions of female direc-tors exhibit lower CO₂ emissions and greater efficiency in managing emissions rela-tive to their workforce size. Some control variables are also considered. Among the control variables, ownership concentration is associated with lower emissions, indi-cating stronger monitoring, whereas firm size and operational scale increase total emissions, but enhance efficiency. Regional differences show that Northern Europe-an firms perform better environmentally than those in Southern and Eastern regions, consistent with stricter environmental regulations and more advanced technologies. At the end, some valuable implications for policymakers and corporate leaders are offered to promote environmental performance through the governance reforms and gender equality initiatives. Keywords: Environmental Performance, Board Gender Diversity, European Firms.