From social good to operational good? How women influence sustainable operations

Purpose Women can play an important part in integrating sustainability into operations and supply chain management. Yet, it is unclear how their broader representation across the organization influences operational practices and outcomes. Drawing on social role theory, we theorize and empirically examine how women impact sustainable operations in terms of resource usage, product responsibility, and emissions. We further theorize that firms with a greater proportion of women are more averse to unsustainable behavior and thus respond with greater urgency to improve sustainability performance when underperformance occurs as a mechanism. Design/methodology/approach Our empirical analysis uses a fixed effects panel estimation strategy on a sample of 17,532 observations from 2003 to 2023 across 3,867 firms using the Refinitiv V2 Environmental, Social and Governance database. Findings Having more women managers improves firm emissions performance. Women on the board have a broader impact, positively influencing resource usage, product responsibility, and emissions. In the post-hoc analysis, increasing representation of women at the manager and board levels was associated with year-to-year improvements in these same sustainable operations metrics. These improvements are most substantial when the firm underperformed industry peers in the prior year. Originality/value Our empirical results suggest that women can positively impact sustainable operations when they are in a decision-making position. Managerially, we advance a gender-based approach to governing sustainability issues in operations and supply chain management.