Encouraging environmental sustainability through gender : a micro-foundational approach using linguistic gender marking

While studies show that organizational diversity is beneficial to organizations’ practice of environmental sustainability, we know very little about the effect that the gender of an individual director can have on sustainability practice. In this empirical paper, we employ a micro-foundational approach to examine whether the number of women on an organization’s board of directors has a direct effect on its attitude towards environmental sustainability, regardless of the national culture in which the organization is located. Culture in this study is measured through grammatical gender marking, a unique approach to measuring female-oriented cultural effects. Previous studies show that certain cultures have more gender roles than others, which in turn affects general and organizational behavior in that society. Grammatical gender marking enables us to study the impact of gender of the individual director on the organization’s attitude towards environmental sustainability across cultures, by empirically examining data from 71 countries, sampling a total of 4,500 organizations for multiple years and industries. Our findings show that organizations become significantly more proactive in environmental sustainability with the appointment of even one woman to the board of directors, regardless of the local culture. We further show that the organization’s level of disclosure regarding its sustainability activities, increases with the number of women on the board of directors. Our data also show a significantly negative relationship between various gender-based language indices and the presence of women on the board of directors. In cultures defined by a language that has clear grammatical gender markings, there is a tendency to appoint fewer women to boards of directors, thereby influencing indirectly the organization’s attitude towards environmental sustainability

Structure–activity correlations in thin film model catalysts: CO hydrogenation on Rh/VOx Part I. The morphology, composition and structure of vanadia-supported and -promoted Rh particles upon oxidation and reduction

The combination of (high-resolution) electron microscopy and electron diffraction was applied to study the structural and morphological alterations of a number of Rh/VOx-model systems upon oxidation and reduction, and to discriminate between different phenomena of metal–support interaction. Well-defined Rh particles (mean size 10–15 nm) were grown epitaxially on NaCl(001) surfaces and subsequently covered by layers of VOx of varying thickness (0.07–2 nm), prepared by reactive deposition of V metal in 10−2 Pa O2. Most films were covered with a stabilizing layer of amorphous alumina. The resulting model catalysts were subjected to an oxidative treatment at 673 K in O2 for 1 h and to subsequent reduction in the temperature range 373–873 K. While higher VOx exposures (mean VOx coverage ≥ 3 nm) favour the formation of crystalline V2O3 phases in partial epitaxial orientation to the Rh particles in the as-deposited state, lower exposures result in less ordered layers of cubic VO. Similarly, after a treatment in 1 bar O2 at 673 K the oxidation states of vanadium vary between V5+ and V2+, depending on the film thickness. Decoration of Rh by reduced VOx species was found to be the dominant feature of metal–support interaction upon reduction at low temperatures (T < 573 K), whereas at increasing reduction temperature the formation of distinct Rh–V alloys (V3Rh5, Rh3V, V3Rh and VRh, respectively) was observed. On a “VOx/Rh/Al2O3” catalyst, prepared by depositing 1ML VOx prior to Rh deposition alloy formation was not detected, and decoration of the metal particles was the dominant effect of reduction at 673 K. A counterpart to Rh/V “subsurface” or “surface” alloys, known to be formed on bulk Rh surfaces under similar conditions, could not be observed