Board gender diversity and environmental innovation: the role of time horizons and SEW in Chinese family firms

This study examines whether, and under what conditions, board gender diversity fosters environmental innovation in Chinese listed family firms. Using panel data for 2010–2022 and two-way firm and year fixed-effects models, we find that higher board gender diversity is associated with modest but statistically robust increases in subsequent green patenting. The association is stronger in firms with longer leadership tenures, weaker in heavily polluting industries, and only weakly differentiated by donation-based proxies for socioemotional-wealth salience. Interpreted through a behavioral corporate-governance lens, the results highlight the role of organizational patience, stakeholder sensitivity, resource stewardship and reputation-oriented motives in translating board composition into substantive green technological change. Overall, board gender diversity appears to operate as a governance complement whose effectiveness depends on time horizons and sectoral constraints, implying that complementary policy and financial instruments are needed to realize similar gains in hard-to-abate sectors.

JEL codes: O32, G34, Q55, M14, J16.

1 Introduction

Board gender diversity is increasingly recognized as a factor shaping firms' strategic and environmental decisions. Environmental innovation has become central to competitiveness and regulatory compliance, especially in China (Porter and Linde, 1995). Yet evidence on whether gender-diverse boards foster green innovation remains mixed: some studies report positive associations, while others find null or context-dependent effects (Adams and Ferreira, 2009; Albitar et al., 2023; Chu, 2024; Javed et al., 2023; Mansour et al., 2024; Hu and Wu, 2025). Family firms provide a salient context for examining this relationship because they often emphasize socioemotional wealth (SEW) and dynastic legacy, features aligned with environmental stewardship and longer investment horizons (Le Breton-Miller and Miller, 2006; Sharma and Sharma, 2019). In such firms, board gender diversity may operate through heightened stakeholder sensitivity, more stewardship-oriented deployment of financial and reputational resources, stronger reputational signaling and a greater willingness to support long-horizon investments.

This study investigates how board gender diversity influences environmental innovation in Chinese listed family firms. China offers a pertinent setting: listed firms face strong climate-policy pressures and expanding green-finance initiatives, while granular governance and patent data allow for large-sample analysis (Rivera León et al., 2023). We link board gender composition in year t to green patenting in t+1 using two-way fixed-effects models with standard controls and examine three boundary conditions: long-term orientation (leadership horizon), SEW salience (charitable giving and reputational motives) and polluting intensity (sectoral technological difficulty and compliance pressure).

Our inquiry builds on three strands of scholarship. First, a growing literature links female participation in corporate governance to innovation and environmental outcomes: gender-diverse boards and female top managers can be associated with greater green innovation, stronger ESG performance and lower corporate risk, though magnitudes and signs vary across roles and contexts (Mansour et al., 2025, 2024; Saleh et al., 2025; Al-Tahat et al., 2025; Alhasnawi et al., 2025; Griffin et al., 2021; Galbreath, 2019; Chu, 2024). Second, research on family enterprises emphasizes that family control, SEW protection and long-term orientation shape innovation and sustainability, with recent work suggesting that female directors in family firms can be especially consequential for innovation, CSR and climate strategy (Hernández-Lara and Gonzáles-Bustos, 2020; Bauweraerts et al., 2022; Campopiano et al., 2017; Maseda et al., 2022). Third, studies of green finance and environmental regulation in China show that policy and financial architecture critically influence firms' ability to undertake costly, long-gestation green innovation (Lee et al., 2023; Li et al., 2022; Lei and Wang, 2023; Zhu and Tan, 2022; Liu and Xiong, 2022; Ambec et al., 2013). Bringing these strands together, we use family firms to examine when board gender diversity translates into environmental innovation.

Family businesses constitute a distinctive governance institution in which ownership, control and identity are tightly intertwined (Burkart et al., 2003; Franks et al., 2012). Concentrated family ownership, overlapping owner–manager roles and the pursuit of SEW—non-financial benefits related to control, reputation and dynastic succession—alter the behavioral assumptions of standard agency and stewardship theories. Many family firms operate with “patient capital”: shareholders who commit resources over long horizons and tolerate delayed payoffs to preserve the business for future generations and protect its social and environmental legitimacy (Schepers et al., 2020; Memili et al., 2017; De Massis et al., 2013; Casado-Belmonte et al., 2021). This long-term, not purely financial orientation has been linked to sustained investment in innovation and sustainability, but also to heterogeneity in how far families are willing to move beyond the status quo.

Building on this work, we conceptualize “organizational patience” as a temporal capability that emerges when owners and top decision-makers are willing to sustain risky, long-horizon projects despite short-term performance pressures. Organizational patience shapes how four related mechanisms operate: stakeholder sensitivity (greater attention to environmental and social externalities), resource stewardship (more cautious deployment of financial and reputational capital), reputational signaling (using visible environmental actions to signal responsible stewardship) and long-term investment logic (backing projects with slow and uncertain payoffs). Female directors are often portrayed as placing greater weight on downside environmental and reputational risk and on the interests of external stakeholders. Organizational patience and SEW determine whether these stakeholder-sensitive, stewardship-oriented and reputation-driven preferences are channeled into incremental adjustments or into substantive, long-horizon environmental innovation. In family firms, such patience is underpinned by patient capital and long-term orientation but is neither automatic nor homogeneous: some families use it to support innovative, sustainability-oriented strategies, whereas others entrench familiar routines or favor symbolic gestures such as donations over deeper technological change (Sharma and Sharma, 2019). By exploiting cross-firm differences in time horizons (e.g. leadership tenure), SEW salience (e.g. charitable donations) and environmental exposure (e.g. polluting vs. non-polluting industries), our analysis uses family firms as a natural laboratory to show how organizational patience amplifies or dampens the effect of board gender diversity on environmental innovation.

Relative to standard agency, stakeholder and upper-echelons perspectives, this framework treats board gender diversity as operating within a temporal and identity-based architecture rather than solely as an incremental monitoring device or a generic proxy for stakeholder orientation. Agency views help to motivate the monitoring role of diverse boards but have little to say about when such monitoring leads to more patient, long-horizon environmental investments. Stakeholder perspectives highlight broader accountability to affected constituencies but are largely silent on whether this takes the form of symbolic gestures or costly technological change. Upper-echelons theory links decision-makers' observable characteristics, including gender, to strategic outcomes, yet typically abstracts from the time horizons and SEW-related identity concerns that shape how these traits are expressed. By combining these insights, we emphasize that organizational patience and SEW determine whether gender-diverse boards translate environmental and stakeholder-sensitive preferences into substantive green innovation or primarily into low-cost, symbolic environmentalism.

Figure 1 summarizes the proposed relationships between board gender diversity and environmental innovation (H1) and the moderating roles of long-term orientation (H2) and SEW salience (H3).

Figure 1

Figure 1. Conceptual framework.

This paper makes three main contributions. First, we contribute to the literature on board gender diversity and environmental outcomes by providing large-sample evidence on how board gender diversity influences green innovation in Chinese listed family firms, a context where ownership, identity and governance are tightly coupled (Griffin et al., 2021; Chu, 2024; Cordeiro et al., 2020; Mansour et al., 2025, 2024; Saleh et al., 2025; Al-Tahat et al., 2025). Relative to recent work documenting positive effects of female leadership and gender boards on environmental innovation, ESG outcomes and risk in global energy and Asian listed firms, our focus on family firms foregrounds time horizons and SEW as the conditions under which board gender diversity translates into environmental innovation. Second, we advance family business research by using family firms not just as an empirical category, but as a theoretically rich setting to examine how a patient temporal stance and reputation-oriented SEW motives jointly condition the relationship between board gender diversity and environmental innovation (De Massis et al., 2013; Duran et al., 2016; Hernández-Lara and Gonzáles-Bustos, 2020). Third, we connect patient-capital and green-finance literatures with the study of green innovation in emerging markets (Sharma and Sharma, 2019; Liu and Xiong, 2022; Ambec et al., 2013). Our results suggest that patient capital and long-term orientation alone do not guarantee higher environmental innovation; rather, they create a fertile ground in which gender-diverse boards can translate environmental and stakeholder preferences into substantive green technological change, helping to explain mixed findings on both family ownership and board gender diversity in prior work.

2 Data and empirical design

2.1 Sample

We construct a panel of Chinese A-share listed family firms over 2010–2022. Family-firm status is obtained from the CSMAR China Listed Family Firms Research Database, which classifies a listed company as a family firm when the ultimate controller is an identified individual or family rather than the state or a widely held corporation, and at least one of the chairperson, CEO or general manager has a documented kinship tie to the controlling family. Family status is allowed to vary over time and we retain only firm-year observations that satisfy these control and kinship conditions. We exclude financial firms, those under special treatment (ST) designations and firms with fewer than three annual observations, yielding about 24,000 firm-year observations. The sample period brackets the 2014 revision of China's Environmental Protection Law and aligns with the institutional context described earlier (Wu et al., 2024; Rivera León et al., 2023).

2.2 Variables

The dependent variable is Green patents, identified via the WIPO IPC Green Inventory. Robustness checks use alternative outcomes: Green invention patents and Citation-weighted green patents. All patent-based outcomes are measured in year t+1 to align with governance and control variables measured at t, and are entered as log(1 + x) to retain zero observations and reduce right-skewness. These variables jointly capture firms' environmental innovation output.

The key independent variable is Board gender diversity, defined as the ratio of board seats held by women (Kanter, 1977; Adams and Ferreira, 2009; Torchia et al., 2011). Three moderators correspond to the main hypotheses: (i) long-term orientation, measured by average CEO and director tenure at the firm level (H2); (ii) socioemotional-wealth salience, proxied by average charitable donation intensity (H3) (Berrone et al., 2012); and (iii) industry polluting intensity, coded as an indicator for heavy-pollution sectors (H4) (Porter and Linde, 1995; Zhu and Tan, 2022). Control variables capture standard firm characteristics: Total assets (log of assets), Firm age (log of years since listing), Profitability (return on assets), Leverage (liabilities over assets), Tobin's Q (market-to-book ratio), Sales growth (year-on-year sales change), Financial constraints (KZ index), Cash flow status (positive operating cash flow scaled by assets) and R&D intensity (R&D expenditure scaled by firm size). Following standard practice, all time-varying financial variables (profitability, leverage, sales growth, R&D expenditure and intensity, donation amounts, financial constraints and Tobin's Q) are winsorised at the 1st and 99th percentiles within each year before transformation and estimation to limit the influence of extreme outliers (Brown et al., 2009; Wooldridge, 2010).

2.3 Descriptive statistics

Appendix Table 1 presents descriptive statistics for the main variables. Board gender diversity averages around 23% of board seats, with substantial variation across firms and over time. Environmental innovation outcomes, as captured by green patents, are relatively sparse and highly skewed, consistent with prior work on Chinese listed firms. Control variables display typical dispersion in size, profitability and leverage, supporting the use of fixed-effects specifications.

2.4 Empirical strategy

We estimate two-way fixed-effects models of the form:

$\begin{array}{l}{\text{Green patents}}_{i,t+1}=\beta {\text{ Board gender diversity}}_{i,t}+{\gamma }^{\prime }{X}_{i,t}+{\mu }_i\\ +{\lambda }_t+{\epsilon }_{i,t+1},& (1)\end{array}$

where μ_i and λ_t denote firm and year fixed effects, and X_{i, t} is the control vector. Standard errors are clustered at the firm level. Moderation is evaluated via subsample splits (high vs. low groups) corresponding to H2 (long-term orientation), H3 (socioemotional wealth) and H4 (polluting intensity), rather than single-equation interaction terms, to keep the moderation patterns transparent given sample-size constraints in some groups. Robustness checks include alternative patent measures, industry-by-year fixed effects and fixed-effects Poisson models (Hausman et al., 1984; Cameron and Trivedi, 2013). Appendix Table 2 in the section “Summary of empirical strategies” provides a concise overview of these empirical specifications and robustness checks.

2.5 Hypotheses

Drawing on the preceding framework, we view board gender diversity as bringing stronger environmental and stakeholder-oriented preferences into the boardroom, with organizational patience and SEW shaping how far these preferences are translated into green innovation. We state our hypotheses as follows:

H1. Board gender diversity is positively associated with environmental innovation in Chinese listed family firms.

H2. The positive association between board gender diversity and environmental innovation is stronger in firms with greater long-term orientation, as reflected in longer leadership tenures.

H3. The positive association between board gender diversity and environmental innovation is stronger in firms with higher socioemotional-wealth salience, as proxied by charitable donations.

H4. The positive association between board gender diversity and environmental innovation is weaker in heavily polluting industries than in less polluting industries.

3 Results

3.1 Baseline estimates

Table 1 reports the association between board gender diversity and next-period green patents. Across specifications with firm and year fixed effects, the coefficient on Board gender diversity is positive and statistically significant, with point estimates between 0.043 and 0.061. On the log(1 + x) scale, a 10 percentage-point increase in board gender diversity is linked to roughly 0.5%–0.7% more green patents, and moving from zero to gender parity implies around 3% higher green output. Given the overall sparsity and skewness of patenting, these are modest but economically meaningful shifts. VIF diagnostics reported in Appendix Table 3 show that all explanatory variables exhibit low to moderate VIF values (maximum 2.94), indicating that multicollinearity is not driving the main results. Robustness checks using alternative patent outcomes, industry-by-year effects and fixed-effects Poisson models yield similar patterns, supporting the interpretation that board gender diversity acts as a governance complement rather than a stand-alone driver of environmental innovation.

Table 1

Table 1. Main results.

3.2 Long-term orientation

Table 2 examines how the association between board gender diversity and green innovation varies with leadership tenure, used as a proxy for long-term orientation. For CEO tenure, the coefficient on Board gender diversity is larger and statistically significant in the high-tenure subsample, and smaller and imprecisely estimated in the low-tenure group. This suggests that in firms led by longer-serving CEOs, female directors are better able to influence the strategic direction of innovation toward green technologies, consistent with the view that patient leadership supports long-horizon, stewardship-oriented investments. For director tenure, both subsamples show positive coefficients of similar magnitude; the effect is significant in the low-tenure group and somewhat noisier in the high-tenure group. One interpretation is that longer-serving CEOs provide strategic continuity and patience, while relatively newer directors contribute fresh perspectives that help gender-diverse boards steer innovation portfolios. Overall, the tenure-based splits support H2: organizational patience and leadership stability condition the extent to which board gender diversity translates into green innovation in family firms.

Table 2

Table 2. Heterogeneity by leadership tenure.

3.3 Socioemotional wealth

Table 3 explores heterogeneity by donation intensity, our proxy for socioemotional-wealth (SEW) salience. Board gender diversity is associated with green patenting in both high- and low-donation firms, and the numerical magnitudes are similar, translating into around 0.6%–0.7% more green patents for a 10 percentage-point increase in board gender diversity. However, only the low-donation subsample yields a statistically significant coefficient, and the high-donation estimate is imprecisely measured. The R&D spending regressions show more pronounced but noisy differences: in high-donation firms the point estimate on board gender diversity is large but weakly identified, whereas in low-donation firms it is close to zero. We therefore interpret donation-based SEW as offering only limited empirical support for H3. Conceptually, philanthropic giving may reflect reputation-oriented identity motives and organizational patience, but in practice the donation data are too noisy to sustain strong claims about systematic differences in green patent outcomes, reinforcing our view of SEW as one dimension of a broader multi-faceted capability.

Table 3

Table 3. Heterogeneity by donation intensity.

3.4 Polluting intensity

Table 4 examines how environmental exposure conditions the relationship between board gender diversity and green innovation by estimating the model separately for heavily polluting vs. less-polluting industries. The estimates indicate a clear asymmetry. In high-pollution sectors, the coefficient on Board gender diversity is small and statistically insignificant, whereas in low-pollution sectors it is larger and significant at the 5% level. These values correspond to roughly 0.3% vs. 0.7% more green patents per 10 percentage-point increase in board gender diversity, underscoring that the economic impact of gender-diverse boards is notably attenuated in hard-to-abate sectors. The R&D regressions present a similar picture: coefficients are positive but imprecise, suggesting that the stronger patenting effects in less-polluting sectors are not solely driven by contemporaneous differences in R&D spending. Together, these results support H4: technological complexity and compliance pressures in high-pollution industries appear to mute the governance effect of board gender diversity, while in less-polluting industries gender-diverse boards more readily translate environmental and stakeholder-oriented preferences into green innovation.

Table 4

Table 4. Heterogeneity by polluting-industry status.

3.5 Summary

Overall, the results show that board gender diversity is positively associated with environmental innovation in Chinese family firms, but the magnitude of this association is modest and context dependent. Longer leadership horizons strengthen the relationship, donation-based SEW measures offer only weak empirical differentiation, and heavily polluting industries attenuate the link between gender-diverse boards and green patenting. These patterns are consistent with the theoretical framework developed in Section 2: leadership tenure proxies organizational patience, donation intensity captures reputation-oriented identity concerns, and polluting intensity reflects technological and regulatory constraints on redirecting innovation portfolios. Taken together, the findings indicate that board gender diversity operates as a governance complement whose effectiveness depends on organizational patience and sectoral conditions rather than as a stand-alone driver of green innovation.

4 Discussion and conclusion

4.1 Theoretical implications

The results speak to behavioral corporate-governance perspectives by showing that board gender diversity acts as a modest but robust governance complement whose influence on environmental innovation depends on organizational patience and sectoral context. Rather than emphasizing point estimates, we interpret the stronger associations under longer leadership tenures, the muted effects in heavily polluting industries and the weak differentiation by donation-based SEW proxies through upper-echelons, SEW and risk-finance lenses. These patterns highlight how stakeholder sensitivity, stewardship, reputational motives and time horizons jointly shape when gender-diverse boards can redirect innovation portfolios toward greener technologies.

The heterogeneity patterns align with our model of organizational patience and SEW. Industry differences suggest that technological and compliance constraints can dampen the capacity of gender-diverse boards to shift innovation in hard-to-abate sectors. We characterize the resulting mechanism as a form of “patient nudging” in family firms operating through four channels: (i) heightened stakeholder sensitivity, (ii) stewardship-oriented use of financial and reputational resources, (iii) reputational signaling to regulators, investors and communities, and (iv) long-term investment logic that tolerates slow and uncertain payoffs. Female directors are most effective in activating these channels when patient capital and stable leadership give them the time and discretion to steer innovation portfolios; in impatient or weak-SEW settings, diverse boards are more easily confined to symbolic or low-cost environmental gestures. By explicitly linking board gender diversity to organizational patience and SEW, the study refines family-firm and upper-echelons theories and helps explain mixed findings on family ownership and board gender diversity in prior work.

4.2 Managerial implications

For managers and boards in family firms, three implications follow. First, board design should avoid tokenism and provide a meaningful presence of female directors, ideally combining family and independent members with experience in environmental or technological domains and roles on key committees. Second, appointing women to the board is most likely to yield substantive green innovation when diversity is embedded in a broader sustainability strategy and long-term orientation: environmental objectives need to be written into board charters, female directors given explicit responsibility and voice on environmental strategy, risk oversight and stakeholder engagement, and incentives aligned with multi-year environmental projects rather than short-term earnings. Third, in heavily polluting sectors where technological and compliance constraints are tight, managers should not expect board gender diversity alone to deliver large shifts in environmental innovation; pairing diverse boards with dedicated green R&D budgets, external technical expertise and green-finance instruments, and integrating green innovation into the core business plan rather than treating it as stand-alone CSR, is likely to be necessary.

4.3 Policy implications

For policymakers, the findings indicate that governance reforms and board gender initiatives may have the greatest impact where firms already enjoy some degree of organizational patience and technological flexibility. This is consistent with international frameworks that emphasize the role of corporate governance and investment for sustainable development, including OECD guidance on responsible business conduct, UNCTAD's investment-for-sustainable-development agenda and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals on gender equality, innovation and climate action. In hard-to-abate sectors, complementary green-finance instruments and de-risking measures are needed, since governance effects alone may be insufficient (Lee et al., 2023; Lei and Wang, 2023). Policies that broaden the pipeline of qualified female directors, encourage stable ownership structures and long-term incentive schemes and support disclosure of environmental and governance practices are likely to be mutually reinforcing for environmental innovation.

4.4 Limitations and future research

This study has limitations. First, the estimates are correlational: despite extensive controls and fixed effects, unobserved shocks may still bias the coefficients, and causal designs exploiting board- or policy-based shocks (for example, gender quotas or regional environmental regulations) would be valuable. Second, our patent-based measures of green innovation capture one dimension of environmental innovation and depend on firms' propensities to patent; they may understate process, organizational or abatement innovation. Third, the analysis focuses on Chinese A-share listed family firms and does not explicitly model within-country regional heterogeneity in institutional quality, environmental policy and industrial structure, which may condition both board composition and innovation responses. The donation-based SEW proxy is also relatively noisy and incomplete.

Future research linking board composition to emissions, broader environmental performance metrics or green revenues, combining patent data with non-patent innovation measures and modeling regional differences more explicitly would extend this analysis. Cross-country comparative studies that examine whether similar board gender diversity–environmental innovation mechanisms operate under different governance regimes, quota policies and environmental regulations, and longer-horizon longitudinal designs that follow firms through major governance or policy changes, would further clarify the temporal dynamics of organizational patience, SEW and environmental innovation highlighted here. In sum, greater board gender diversity is associated with stronger environmental innovation, especially where firms exhibit patience, reputational focus and lower technological barriers; governance and policy complements are essential to realize these gains at scale.

Data availability statement

The data used in this study are proprietary and were obtained from the CSMAR database. Access to the data is available upon reasonable request through the CSMAR platform (https://www.csmar.com).

Author contributions

ZZ: Supervision, Methodology, Formal analysis, Data curation, Software, Writing – original draft, Funding acquisition, Validation, Resources, Conceptualization, Investigation, Visualization, Project administration, Writing – review & editing.

Funding

The author(s) declared that financial support was received for this work and/or its publication. This work was supported by the Macau University of Science and Technology Faculty Research Grants (FRG-25-020-MSB, 2025) and Excellent Young Scholars Scientific Research Program of Department of Education in Hunan Province in China (23B0038, 2024–2026).

Conflict of interest

The author(s) declared that this work was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

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The author(s) declared that generative AI was used in the creation of this manuscript. The authors used an AI tool for grammar and format check.

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Supplementary material

The Supplementary Material for this article can be found online at: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/frsus.2025.1714107/full#supplementary-material

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