Panel data analysis reveals board gender diversity improves ESG performance in tourism firms, indicating national gender equality strengthens sustainable corporate governance.
This study investigates how female participation on corporate boards influences ESG score in firms operating in the tourism sector, specifically within the hospitality, leisure, and airline industries. Anchored in Upper Echelons Theory and Institutional Theory, the model examines institutional quality and national gender equality as moderating factors capturing interactions between internal governance characteristics and external contextual conditions. Panel data from 292 firms, obtained from Thomson Reuters and complemented with indicators from the World Bank and the United Nations, were analyzed using fixed-effects regressions. The results show that board gender diversity is positively associated with ESG performance and that higher gender equality significantly strengthens this relationship, whereas institutional quality has no significant moderating effect. These findings suggest that, in tourism, a sector highly dependent on reputation, stakeholder trust, and social legitimacy, sociocultural factors play a more decisive role than formal institutions. The study offers theoretical and practical implications for sustainable governance.
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Ferretti et al. (2026) studied this question.
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