Women and CSR: why gender parity is also a climate issue

In France, companies with more than 1,000 employees have until March 2026 to reach 30% women among their senior executives and in their management bodies — an obligation set by the 2021 Rixain law, which provides for a second threshold of 40% in March 2029.

At European level, the directive on gender balance on corporate boards sets a target of 40% of non-executive directors from the under-represented sex by June 2026.

These figures are not merely symbolic. Behind them lies a reality that research is beginning to document seriously: gender parity in business and environmental performance are linked.

Greener boards when women sit on them

Corporate governance research increasingly documents a positive association between board gender diversity and companies’ ESG performance. An analysis of S&P 500 companies (ISS-oekom, published by the Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance, 2018) shows that companies with at least three women directors outperform their peers on combined, environmental and social ESG scores — with a stronger effect for companies that have maintained this diversity over the long term.

Globally, a study of nearly 10,000 companies in 50 countries (Barroso, Duan, Guo & Kowalewski, Journal of Corporate Finance, 2024) uses gender diversity legislative reforms as a natural experiment and concludes that an increase in the number of women directors leads on average to a 4% reduction in direct and a 3% reduction in indirect CO₂ emissions — with a stronger effect when the reform is legislative in origin.

Research on listed European companies (Haque, Adjei-Mensah, Nguyen & Ntim, Accounting Forum, 2024) confirms that gender diversity on boards and in executive teams is positively associated both with better procedural carbon management and with actual emission reductions. These results establish robust associations; the exact causal chain remains an active research topic, and the strength of the effects varies with institutional and sector contexts.

The data confirm this at the individual level too. A study from the London School of Economics (Berland & Leroutier, May 2025) documents a 26% gap in carbon footprint between men and women for food and transport — roughly half of the average individual footprint. A figure that shows in concrete terms that gender and climate are, in France as well, deeply linked.

“Parity is not a quota to tick off. It is a lever for transforming management practices, including on climate.”

In supply chains, a concrete impact

The effect is not limited to boardrooms. In agricultural supply chains, giving women equal access to resources could increase food production by 2.5 to 4% — thereby reducing pressure on land and, by extension, deforestation-related emissions.

Researchers estimate that closing the productivity gap between men and women in agriculture could avoid up to 2 billion tonnes of CO₂ by 2050.

In the garment industry — where women make up around 68% of the workforce — the situation is even more striking. The textile sector emits more than a billion tonnes of CO₂ a year, and it is women workers who bear the most direct consequences: extreme heat, floods, income instability linked to climate hazards. Empowering these women is a matter of both justice and climate effectiveness.

Indicator	Figure
EU target for non-executive directors from the under-represented sex by June 2026	40%
Average reduction in direct emissions after more women join the board	−4%
Carbon footprint gap between women and men (France, food + transport)	−26%

What the law requires — and what it cannot impose

France has a relatively advanced legal framework on these issues. In addition to the Rixain law, the Professional Equality Index has required companies with more than 50 employees, since 2018, to measure and publish their pay gaps every year.

The European CSRD directive requires detailed reporting including parity indicators: gender pay gap, gender distribution in management bodies, turnover by gender. Note: in February 2026, the Council of the EU adopted the Omnibus I package, which narrows the CSRD’s scope to companies with more than 1,000 employees and €450m in turnover.

But the law sets floors, not ceilings. Above all, it cannot impose what belongs to corporate culture: the way people listen, make trade-offs and frame long-term objectives. This is where parity has its most diffuse — and most lasting — effects.

Towards truly integrated CSR

For a long time, CSR policies treated gender equality and environmental strategy as two separate silos. One belonged to human resources, the other to the sustainability department. Recent research invites us to move beyond this fragmentation.

When governance is gender-balanced, climate decisions are better anticipated. When women are included throughout the value chain, practices become more resilient. Frameworks such as Gender Equality Mainstreaming (GEM) seek to formalise this integration by systematically incorporating gender criteria into every ESG dimension.

The idea is simple: you cannot claim to take sustainability seriously while ignoring half of humanity in the decisions that affect it.

Gender parity in business is not a side issue to the ecological transition. It is one of its conditions. French companies that have understood this are no longer trying to meet quotas — they are building organisations capable of facing an uncertain future. And in that future, having diverse leaders is not a progressive ideal. It is a survival strategy.

Sources

Rixain law (Law No. 2021-1774 of 24 December 2021) — legifrance.gouv.fr
Directive (EU) 2022/2381 on gender balance among directors of listed companies — eur-lex.europa.eu
CSRD Directive (EU) 2022/2464 and ESRS S1 (Own workforce) — eur-lex.europa.eu
Omnibus I — Council of the EU press release, 24 February 2026 — consilium.europa.eu
Professional Equality Index (Index de l’égalité professionnelle) — travail-emploi.gouv.fr
Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance (2018), Across the Board Improvements: Gender Diversity and ESG Performance (ISS-oekom data, S&P 500) — corpgov.law.harvard.edu
Barroso R., Duan T., Guo S., Kowalewski O. (2024), Board Gender Diversity Reform and Corporate Carbon Emissions, Journal of Corporate Finance — doi.org/10.1016/j.corpfin.2024.102717
Haque F., Adjei-Mensah G., Nguyen T.H.H., Ntim C.G. (2024), Does gender diversity in corporate boards and executive management teams influence carbon performance? Evidence from Europe, Accounting Forum — doi.org/10.1080/01559982.2024.2423989
Berland O. & Leroutier M. (2025), The gender gap in carbon footprints: determinants and implications, LSE Grantham Research Institute, Working Paper No. 424 — lse.ac.uk/granthaminstitute
FAO (2011), The State of Food and Agriculture 2010-11 — Women in Agriculture — fao.org
UNEP (2023), Sustainability and Circularity in the Textile Value Chain — A Global Roadmap — unep.org