Pinkwashing in the banking industry: the relevance of board characteristics

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR)-washing has been commonly applied to environmental practices under greenwashing, while limited research deals with social-washing applied to gender issues. This work aims to verify how banks engage in pinkwashing. We identify pinkwasher as a bank that discloses the adoption of policies that directly or indirectly aim to improve gender equality but performs poorly in such aspects. The analysis is developed on an international panel of 170 banks active in 46 countries over four years, from 2017 to 2020. Results, robust to endogeneity, reveal that banks with a high percentage of women on the board, many independent directors, and a female CEO are less prone to adopt pinkwashing behavior. Also, country factors are critical drivers of pinkwashing, highlighting the relevant role of institutional initiatives in favoring gender representation and parity.