Women and circular transition in agri-food industry: The commitment to gender diversity as an engine of change

The agri-food industry has a positive impact on society, providing a sustainable and high-quality food source for the world's population. However, this industry has a significant impact on the environment, which is essential to know and understand. In this article, we explore the importance of the circular transition in the agri-food industry and analyse the role that female directors, C-suite executives or managers and employees play in it. For a sample of the most relevant 243 agri-food companies worldwide, over the period 2013-2022, we conduct Tobit and lineal regressions for panel data to attend to gender diversity in firms and its consequences concerning this circularity environmental model. In a sector with unbalanced organisational levels in terms of gender, the results show that the overall diversity of the companies favours the transition towards a circular model that is respectful of the environment, favouring the optimisation of resources and processes that lead to the generation of minimum waste, and unequivocally opting for ecological inputs, technologies, spaces and other goods. However, the individualised study of diversity at the organisational levels confirms the unquestionable role that female leadership plays in the circular transition of the agri-food sector when exercised from C-suite positions.