The Influence of Women’s Leadership on Organizational Alignment with Sustainable Development Goals: A Discriminant Analysis Approach
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Abstract
Although it seems that the roles of leaders in sustainable development are extremely important, it is not entirely clear whether the obstacles for women leaders in this context have really changed and to what extent there is still gender discrimination in this domain. In line with this, the study investigates the relationship between the gender of the leaders and the alignment of organizations with the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) set by the United Nations. With the growing emphasis on sustainability in business practices, understanding how leadership, particularly CEO gender, influences corporate sustainability initiatives is crucial. The research adopts a quantitative approach to analyze data from organizations led by both male and female CEOs across various industries. By considering the 17 SDGs as independent variables, the study aims to discern whether organizations led by female CEOs exhibit a stronger commitment to specific sustainability goals compared to those led by male CEOs. The analysis seeks to uncover patterns in goal prioritization and explore whether gendered leadership affects sustainability outcomes. The findings are expected to provide insights into how leadership characteristics impact an organization’s sustainability strategies and could suggest future policies and practices aimed at enhancing gender diversity in leadership roles.
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References
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[2] Adams, R. B., & Ferreira, D. (2009). Women in the boardroom and their impact on governance and performance. Journal of Financial Economics, 94(2), 291–309. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jfineco.2008.10.007
[3] Agasalim, A. A. (2021). Importance and Role of Women within the Business Community of Azerbaijan. Journal of Women's Entrepreneurship and Education, (1-2), 84-108.
[4] Ali, M. (2020). PyCaret: An open source, low-code machine learning library in Python (PyCaret version 1.0.0). PyCaret. https://www.pycaret.org
[5] Batista, G. E., Prati, R. C., & Monard, M. C. (2004). A study of the behavior of several methods for balancing machine learning training data. ACM SIGKDD explorations newsletter, 6(1), 20-29.
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[17] Habachi, M., & Benbachir, S. (2019). Combination of linear discriminant analysis and expert opinion for the construction of credit rating models: The case of SMEs. Cogent Business & Management, 6(1), 1685926.
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[21] IBM Corp. Released (2021). IBM SPSS Statistics for Windows, Version 28.0. Armonk, NY: IBM Corp.
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[23] Kamath, B. (2022). Board gender diversity and intellectual capital performance of firms in India. Journal of Women’s Entrepreneurship and Education, (1-2), 97–116.
[24] Kirkpatrick, S. A., & Locke, E. A. (1991). Leadership: Do traits matter? The Executive, 5(2), 48–60. https://doi.org/10.5465/ame.1991.4274679
[25] Kumar Basantia, T., & Rameshwari Devi, Y. (2022). Gender discrimination in higher education institutions of Northeast India. Journal of Women’s Entrepreneurship and Education, (3-4), 68–102.
[26] Madsen, S. R., & Bell, M. P. (2014). Women and leadership: A contextual perspective. Routledge.
[27] Manner, M.H. (2010). The impact of CEO characteristics on corporate social performance. Journal of Business Ethics, 93, 53-72
[28] Martinez, A. M., & Kak, A. C. (2001). PCA versus LDA. IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 23(2), 228–233. https://doi.org/10.1109/34.908974
[29] Meier, D. S., Mata, R., & Wulff, D. U. (2021). text2sdg: An open-source solution to monitoring sustainable development goals from text. arXiv. https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.05856
[30] Mokhov, V. (2021). "Glass Ceilings" in the System of Public Administration in the Russian Federation. Journal of Women’s Entrepreneurship and Education, (1-2), 109-121.
[31] Nielsen, S., & Huse, M. (2010). The contribution of women on boards of directors: Going beyond the surface. Corporate Governance. International Review, 18(2), 136–148. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8683.2010.00784.x
[32] Noorhalim, N., Ali, A., Shamsuddin, S.M. (2019). Handling Imbalanced Ratio for Class Imbalance Problem Using SMOTE. In: Kor, LK., Ahmad, AR., Idrus, Z., Mansor, K. (eds.) Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Computing, Mathematics and Statistics (iCMS2017). Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-7279-7_3
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[34] Post, C., & Byron, K. (2015). Women on boards and firm financial performance: A meta-analysis. Academy of Management Journal, 58(5), 1546–1571. https://doi.org/10.5465/amj.2013.0319
[35] Radović Marković, M. (2007). Women Leaders: Case Study of Serbia. In Radović Marković, M. (ed.), The Perspective of Women’s Entrepreneurship in the Age of Globalization, IAP, Charlotte, SAD, pp. 87-95. Available from: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/357974706_WOMEN_IN_BUSINESS_AND_LEADERSHIP_CRITIQUES_AND_DISCUSSIONS [accessed October 17, 2024].
[36] Radović Marković, M. (2023). Principles of management and leadership in a global world. Silver and Smith.
[37] Radović Marković, M., & Radulović, D., Đukanović, B., Kyaruzi Silver, I. (2021). Flexibility and Adaptation – The New Post-Covid Era, Silver & Smith, United Kingdom, ISBN 978-1-80068-337-2.
[38] Radović Marković, M., Salamzadeh, A., & Kawamorita-Kesim, H. (2016). Barriers to the advancement of women into leadership positions: A cross-national study. Proceedings of the International Scientific Conference on Leadership and Organization Development, 287–294.
[39] Radović-Marković, M. (2018). Organisational resilience and business continuity: theoretical and conceptual framework. Journal of Entrepreneurship and Business Resilience, 1(1), 5-11.
[40] Ricci, F., Scafarto, V., & della Corte, G. (2023). Board Gender Diversity, Female Leaders and Corporate Environmental Responsibility: A Structured Literature Review. In: Paoloni, P.,Lombardi, R. (eds.) When the Crisis Becomes an Opportunity. SIDREA Series in Accounting and Business Administration. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21932-0_28 [accessed October 17, 2024].
[41] Rosener, J. B. (2011). Ways women lead. In Leadership, gender, and organization (pp. 19-29). Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands.
[42] Sachs, J. D., Lafortune, G., & Fuller, G. (2024). The SDGs and the UN Summit of the Future. Sustainable Development Report 2024. SDSN. https://doi.org/10.25546/108572
[43] Schler, J., Koppel, M., Argamon, S., & Pennebaker, J. (2006). Effects of age and gender on blogging. Journal of Computational Science Education, 199–205.
[44] Seierstad, C. (2016). The contribution of women on boards to corporate social responsibility: Evidence from the European Union. Journal of Business Ethics, 139(1), 57–71. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-015-2620-9
[45] Terjesen, S., Sealy, R., & Singh, V. (2009). Women directors on corporate boards: A review and research agenda. Corporate Governance: International Review, 17(3), 320–337. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8683.2009.00742.x
[46] UN Economic and Social Council. (2017). Progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals: Report of the Secretary-General (E/2017/66). [accessed October 17, 2024].
[47] United Nations. (2015). Transforming our world: The 2030 agenda for sustainable development. United Nations. https://sdgs.un.org/2030agenda
[48] Van Rossum, G., & Drake, F. L. (2009). Python 3 reference manual. CreateSpace.
[49] Vanderfeesten, I., Reijers, H. A., & Van der Aalst, W. M. (2011). Product-based workflow support. Information Systems, 36(2), 517-535.
[50] Wang, W., Kang, W., & Mu, J. (2023). Mapping research to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). https://doi.org/10.21203/rs.3.rs-2544385/v2
[51] Widegren, K., & Sand, J. (2021). Gender and Sustainability: An International Research Review. The Swedish Secretariat for Gender Research, University of Gothenburg. Available at: GENDERACTION_Gender-and-Sustainability_An-International-Research-Review.pdf
[52] Wulff, D. U., Mata, R., & Meier, D. S. (2021). text2sdg: An open-source solution to monitoring sustainable development goals from text. CoRR, abs/2110.05856. https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.05856
[53] Zheng, W., Kark, R., & Meister, A. (2018). How women manage the gendered norms of leadership. Harvard Business Review, 28. Available at: https://hbr.org/2018/11/how-women-manage-the-gendered-norms-of-leadership