Chief Executive Officer Gender and Sustainability Disclosure: Evidence from Listed Firms in Kenya
Main Article Content
Keywords
CEO gender, gender diversity, sustainability disclosure, institutional theory, Nairobi Securities Exchange
Abstract
Sustainability disclosure - the public reporting of a firm’s economic, environmental and social impacts has hardened from a voluntary gesture into a commercial and regulatory imperative, yet in emerging markets its depth and quality remain uneven, and the drivers of substantive rather than symbolic reporting are poorly understood. Because disclosure in weakly enforced settings rests on executive judgement, upper echelons theory directs attention to the characteristics of the executives who exercise it and few characteristics have attracted more governance attention, or produced less settled evidence, than gender. Existing findings are concentrated in developed markets and at board level, leaving the chief executive position itself, where strategic discretion is greatest, largely unexamined in frontier-market settings. This study therefore examines sustainability disclosure among firms listed on the Nairobi Securities Exchange (NSE) a market in which women held roughly one in ten chief executive positions over the study period and where regulatory pressure for both diversity and disclosure has intensified - testing the effect of CEO gender diversity, operationalised as the proportion of women in the apex executive leadership of the firm, anchored on the chief executive position. Using a balanced panel of 320 firm-year observations drawn from 32 NSE-listed firms over the period 2014-2023, sustainability disclosure is measured through content analysis of annual and sustainability reports against a 38-item economic, environmental and social index scored on a 0-3 quality scale. Hausman-selected fixed-effects regression, estimated in Stata, shows that CEO gender diversity exerts a positive and statistically significant effect on sustainability disclosure (β = 0.064, p = 0.023), robust to the inclusion of firm size, firm age and profitability and to a battery of panel diagnostics. The finding is consistent with gender-socialisation, stakeholder-orientation and institutional accounts in which female representation at the corporate apex strengthens ethical sensitivity, stakeholder responsiveness and receptiveness to isomorphic reporting pressures, and it positions executive gender diversity as a substantive governance resource - not a symbolic gesture - for nomination committees and regulators in emerging markets.
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Benjamin K. Tarus, Department of Business Management, School of Business and Management Science, University of Eldoret, P.O. Box 1125-30100, Eldoret, Kenya
Department of Business Management, School of Business and Management Science, University of Eldoret, P.O. Box 1125-30100, Eldoret, Kenya
Emmanuel Tanui , Department of Finance and Accounting, School of Business and Management Science, University of Eldoret, P.O. Box 1125-30100, Eldoret, Kenya
Department of Finance and Accounting, School of Business and Management Science, University of Eldoret, P.O. Box 1125-30100, Eldoret, Kenya
Carolyne Ayuma , Department of Business Management, School of Business and Management Science, University of Eldoret, P.O. Box 1125-30100, Eldoret, Kenya
Department of Business Management, School of Business and Management Science, University of Eldoret, P.O. Box 1125-30100, Eldoret, Kenya