Building a sustainable organization is one of the most important goals in business. To build sustainability, firms need to have strong social commitment to establish value-creating stakeholder relationships. As boards of directors play a critical role in setting strategy, providing management oversight and monitoring, it is also their responsibility to ensure the firm's commitment to its social responsibilities. With the right composition, boards can be effective in driving long-term vision and creating good stakeholder relationships, contributing to firms' social capital. In this paper, we analyze board characteristics of publicly listed US firms and find evidence that support the diversity theory. In particular, that board gender diversity (proportion of female directors) is positively associated with firms' social commitment to human rights, product responsibility, and their community and workforce, evidencing female directors' contribution to firms' sustainability. To ensure the robustness of our analysis, we conduct additional analyses including propensity score matching, entropy balancing, and instrumental-variable analysis.

中文翻译：

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董事会性别多元化、企业社会承诺和可持续性

建立一个可持续发展的组织是企业最重要的目标之一。为了建立可持续性，公司需要有强有力的社会承诺，以建立创造价值的利益相关者关系。由于董事会在制定战略、提供管理监督和监督方面发挥着关键作用，因此他们也有责任确保公司履行其社会责任。通过正确的组成，董事会可以有效地推动长期愿景和建立良好的利益相关者关系，为公司的社会资本做出贡献。在本文中，我们分析了美国上市公司的董事会特征，并找到了支持多元化理论的证据。特别是，董事会性别多样性（女性董事的比例）与公司的 对人权、产品责任及其社区和劳动力的社会承诺，证明了女性董事对公司可持续发展的贡献。为了确保我们分析的稳健性，我们进行了额外的分析，包括倾向得分匹配、熵平衡和工具变量分析。