Prof. Erekle Pirveli of Caucasus University's School of Business has published a new article in Emerald's Social Responsibility Journal (Scimago Q1, CiteScore: 7.4), one of the leading international outlets in corporate social responsibility research.
The paper, titled "Gendered perspectives in European sustainability reporting standards feedback", investigates whether the gender of feedback providers influences the quantitative characteristics and narrative content of submissions to the European Commission's public consultation on the draft European Sustainability Reporting Standards (ESRS). It also examines whether gender affects substantive positions within a highly technical and institutionalised regulatory environment.
The analysis is based on 276 ESRS feedback documents submitted between June 2023 and July 2024. Using a mixed-methods approach, the study combines frequency statistics, chi-square tests, logistic regression and lexical analysis with WordSmith Tools 9.0, enabling examination of structural linguistic features, co-occurrence networks and thematic patterns.
Results show no statistically significant gender differences in any quantitative or qualitative dimension of the submissions. Men and women use similar vocabulary, sentence structures, collocations and thematic clusters — reflecting the strong discursive constraints of the ESRS technical consultation process. Concordance and clustering analyses reveal four stable semantic domains across all submissions: regulatory/procedural, materiality-related, technical/environmental and organisational/social, consistent regardless of who wrote them. Notably, women are now equally represented among those shaping EU sustainability reporting standards - a meaningful shift compared to what decades of lobbying and standard-setting literature would have predicted.
This research was funded by the Shota Rustaveli National Science Foundation of Georgia (SRNSF).
The paper was co-authored with Prof. Esther Ortiz-Martínez and Prof. Salvador Marín-Hernández (Universidad de Murcia, Spain).
The full paper is available here.
