Unveiling Corporate Environmental Disclosure: The Effects of Gender Diversity in Boardrooms and Audit Committees

Abstract

This study focuses on examining the impact of board gender diversity in the boardroom and audit committees and the level of corporate environmental disclosures (CED) of listed manufacturing firms at the Dar es Salaam Stock of Exchange (DSE) in Tanzania and Nairobi Security Exchanges (NSE) in Kenya. The study employed stakeholder theory as the theoretical foundation. Fixed effect panel regression was used to analyze a balanced sample of 13 companies for seven years (2016 to 2022) resulting in 91 listed firm-years. The findings reveal that women in the audit committee exerted a positive and significant influence on CED while women directors exhibited a negative and insignificant impact on CED. This study focuses on manufacturing firms to increase the internal validity due to this selection it limits generalization of the findings to other industries. Furthermore, this study contributes to the body of knowledge of corporate governance-related topics of listed manufacturing firms in Kenya and Tanzania.