Gender equality is both a stand-alone objective of the United Nations 2030 Agenda and a dimension that conditions progress across its economic, social, and environmental goals. Progress in education, representation, and formal rights has not removed disparities in access to productive resources, labor-market opportunities, leadership, remuneration, and influence over collective decisions. The 2025 Gender Snapshot underscores the continuing distance between policy commitments and substantive equality across the SDGs [1]. Consequently, understanding Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 5 requires moving beyond the recognition of inequality toward the organizational, institutional, and managerial arrangements through which equality may be advanced—or reproduced.
This motivation informed the Special Issue “Gender Equality: Empowering Women and Girls for Sustainable Development,” hosted by Sustainability in the section “Development Goals towards Sustainability.” Its call invited theoretical and empirical contributions on SDG 5 in business models, environmental and social accounting, management innovation, greenhouse gas (GHG) and carbon accounting, resilience and integrated reporting, innovation systems, sustainability transitions, and business continuity. The premise was that gender equality cannot be separated from the practices through which public and private organizations allocate resources, evaluate performance, exercise governance, and account for social and environmental consequences. In this regard, accounting scholarship has long argued that the SDGs offer both a new empirical setting and a challenge to rethink what organizations measure and to whom they are answerable [2].
Ten research articles were ultimately published in this Special Issue, addressing empirical settings extending from Europe and the Mediterranean to North Africa, the Middle East, China, Ukraine, Bangladesh, and the United States. Their methodological diversity includes firm-level econometrics, banking panel models, household surveys, correlation analysis, machine learning, time–frequency approaches, and interpretive case inquiry. We do not treat the published contributions as a representative sample of the entire SDG 5 literature or attempt a meta-analysis of fundamentally different measures and designs. Rather, this Editorial develops a critical thematic reading of what these studies jointly make visible, where their results qualify conventional assumptions, and which theoretical and practical questions remain open. The contributions are presented in Table 1, with their research contexts and principal implications for SDG 5.
A central insight emerging from the contributions is that meaningful empowerment cannot be inferred from participation or representation alone. Drawing on the established distinction between resources, agency and achievements [3], the Editorial highlights the importance of examining access to opportunities, participation and voice, effective decision authority, and demonstrable outcomes. These interrelated dimensions draw attention to the organizational conditions under which the resources and capabilities available to women may translate into influence, accountability and sustainable development results.
Table 1.
Contributions to the Special Issue and their implications for SDG 5.
The first cluster examines the relationship between women’s representation in governance bodies and organizational outcomes. Drawing on 71 Egyptian listed companies from 2014 to 2019, Eissa et al. report a positive association between board gender diversity and ESG performance, with governmental ownership moderating the relationship [4]. Their findings invite consideration of how ownership and state involvement may shape the context in which board composition influences sustainability-related activities. However, this study should not be read as establishing that public ownership or the appointment of women necessarily improves every dimension of ESG performance across institutional settings.
In a distinct financial context, Ben Mim et al. investigate 61 commercial banks from nine Middle Eastern and North African countries during 2012–2020. They associate higher female board representation with a lower modeled probability of bank distress and improved early-warning predictions, noting that the relationship is more pronounced in crisis conditions than in relatively stable periods [5]. Together, these studies position board gender diversity within questions of risk oversight, sustainability governance, and organizational resilience. They also point to the importance of identifying contingent mechanisms rather than treating gender composition as an isolated and universally beneficial input.
Taken together, the studies discussed above reinforce the basic distinction between composition, conduct, disclosure, and outcomes. The broader governance literature cautions against assuming that additional monitoring necessarily generates uniformly positive firm-level performance effects; the functions performed by directors, the institutional setting, and the outcome being assessed matter [14]. For SDG 5 research, the implication is not to disregard representation; it is to ask how board membership translates into agenda-setting power, scrutiny of management, access to information, influence over strategic trade-offs, and accountability for organizational impacts.
A second cluster investigates the economic opportunities created—or constrained—by technologies, entrepreneurial environments, and productive systems. Zhang et al. analyzed survey data from 1384 rural households in underdeveloped Chinese regions and identified a positive relationship between Internet use and women’s income, with labor input and capital endowments examined as explanatory channels [6]. The study directs attention to digital connectivity as a possible enabling resource, while also revealing heterogeneity according to socioeconomic and household characteristics. The availability of technology should thus be distinguished from the ability to use it productively and on equitable terms.
Alhakamy approaches empowerment through a different methodological lens, combining statistical analysis and machine learning classification using data from 223 respondents. These findings underscore the gap between formal financial access and reported financial independence, alongside the relevance of education and access to legal services [7]. The study offers exploratory insights into the multidimensional nature of empowerment. However, predictive classification performance should not be interpreted as evidence of causal mechanisms, highlighting the need for further research across more diverse populations and institutional settings.
Entrepreneurship adds another dimension. Antohi et al. examined the entrepreneurial intentions of 360 female university students in Romania, identifying significant relationships involving marital status and income satisfaction. However, perceived gender discrimination did not emerge as a statistically significant mediator in the specified model [8]. This non-confirmation is theoretically informative: it does not invalidate the role of discrimination in entrepreneurial ecosystems but indicates that its mechanisms may depend on measurement, context, the relevant social groups, and the pathways through which intentions are formed. Research should therefore separate intentions from actual entrepreneurial entry, survival, control over enterprise resources, and subsequent outcomes.
Akter et al. move from digital inclusion to productive and food-system innovation. Their study of nutrition-sensitive homestead pond polyculture in rural Bangladesh reports higher female participation in aspects of household aquaculture decision-making within project households, as well as interlinked consumption, income, and empowerment pathways [9]. This contribution is especially valuable because it explicitly attends to decision-making: increases in productive capacity or household income alone cannot establish who controls the benefits. Across these studies, technology and enterprise support emerge as potential resources for SDG 5, but their developmental significance depends on whether women have the time, capabilities, rights, and bargaining power required to turn access into agency.
The third cluster considers public institutions and structural features of inequality. Karyy et al. examined 118 territorial communities in Ukraine, exploring the associations between the gender profiles of local government leadership and communities’ economic capacity [10]. This work situates gender equality within territorial governance and brings public administration into a discussion often dominated by corporate boards. However, its observational analysis should not be taken as conclusive evidence that the gender of local government leaders causes stronger economic development. Institutional histories, resource endowments, and selection mechanisms remain pertinent rival explanations.
Tan et al. adopt a different perspective, analyzing gender income inequality across Chinese public and private employment with repeated cross-sectional data from 2003–2021, comprising 29,367 observations. They identify different age-related and period-related patterns across the two sectors, while reporting negligible cohort effects in their specification [11]. The study foregrounds institutional labor-market segmentation and the ways in which organizational rules, remuneration structures and economic transitions may maintain or mitigate unequal outcomes. It also reminds us that equality indicators cannot be interpreted independently of career stage, employment sector or historical institutional context.
Read together, these papers show why SDG 5 should not be reduced to individual characteristics or voluntary organizational commitments. State ownership, local governance, labor-market regulation, and the distribution of public resources may all shape the conversion of formal opportunities into substantive outcomes. Future scholarship must identify which institutional arrangements promote women’s voice and control and whether the effects are sustained across demographic groups, economic cycles, and political or regulatory changes. Such questions call for designs that distinguish description from causation and situate gender-based disparities within the institutional structures that produce them.
This Special Issue also asks whether sustainability transitions can be understood without examining whose labor and authority underpin environmental management.
Di Vaio and Mastellone offer an interpretive single-case study with ethnographic elements in a Mediterranean shipping agency. The authors report that women perform approximately 80% of the emissions-related information tasks observed, while retaining limited authority over strategic decisions concerning system boundaries and key performance indicators [12]. This case exposes a potentially consequential disconnect between the operational production of carbon information and the right to decide what the information means, how accounting boundaries are established, and which issues become organizational priorities.
The contribution neither shows that women always perform most environmental data work nor that a single case can establish sector-wide patterns. Its theoretical significance lies in reframing carbon accounting as a situated organizational practice, where data traceability and technical capacity may coexist with asymmetric decision rights. This suggests that gender-sensitive carbon accountability requires attention to the governance of information production, validation, boundary-setting, and interorganizational responsibilities—including those arising from Scope 3 dependencies—rather than the disclosure of emissions figures alone [12].
At the macro-level, Fathullah and Khalifa examine co-movement and lead–lag relationships among women’s education, financial development, democratic governance, social globalization, and clean-energy technologies in the United States over 2000–2024, using wavelet-based analysis [13]. Their results indicate time-dependent associations rather than fixed relationships across time horizons. Because such associations do not identify causal mechanisms on their own, they are best interpreted as an invitation to investigate how gender-related capabilities and institutional factors interact with the pace and distribution of energy transitions.
These two studies approach different units of analysis and cannot be integrated into a single effect estimate. Nevertheless, they identify a shared research challenge: environmental transitions are not institutionally or socially neutral. In the language of SDG interdependencies, progress toward climate action, responsible production, and clean energy should be evaluated not only in aggregate environmental terms but also in relation to the allocation of skills, employment opportunities, information control, and strategic authority. The accounting question is therefore both what is counted and who is enabled to count, interpret, contest, and act upon it.
The ten contributions discussed above constitute the scientific corpus of this Special Issue, while the additional references provide theoretical and contextual foundations supporting their critical interpretation.
Although the ten papers address different sectors, countries, samples and outcome variables, their collective insights draw attention to four interrelated dimensions of gender equality and empowerment. The first is access: the availability of employment opportunities, education, finance, connectivity, productive assets and organizational positions. The second is participation and voice: involvement in economic activity, boards, public governance and knowledge-producing routines. The third is decision authority and accountability: the ability to influence resource allocation, organizational objectives, strategic decisions and accountability processes. The fourth concerns outcomes: changes in income, autonomy, resilience, sustainability performance, rights and environmental or social impacts. Drawing on the resources–agency–achievements perspective [3], these four dimensions provide an integrative analytical lens for examining how opportunities and participation translate—or fail to translate—into decision-making authority, accountability and substantive sustainability outcomes. This is an interpretive synthesis, not a framework empirically validated by the Special Issue as a whole.
The first research direction concerns gender-sensitive measurement and accountability. Studies frequently proxy empowerment with female board percentages, entrepreneurial intentions, household income, or the availability of services. These indicators capture relevant but distinct phenomena. Future work should examine which measures reflect access, voice, authority, or achievements and how their relationships vary across firms, households, and public institutions. More specifically, research on sustainability accounting and reporting could evaluate whether gender-disaggregated performance indicators, monitoring systems, resource allocation procedures, and assurance practices reveal substantive changes rather than merely the presence of a disclosure. This agenda requires keeping accounting, reporting, and accountability conceptually distinct: generating decision-useful information is not the same as communicating it, and neither necessarily entails responsiveness to those affected.
A second direction involves the mechanisms linking gender-inclusive governance to outcomes. Board studies suggest associations with ESG scores and resilience, while also highlighting the role of ownership and economic circumstances [4,5]. Future studies should examine committee assignments, expertise, deliberation, influence over budgeting, inclusion in strategic decision-making, and implementation follow-through. Future research could examine how these organizational arrangements shape the relationship between women’s representation, meaningful participation and sustainability-related outcomes across institutional contexts, using longitudinal and mixed-method approaches to better identify the underlying mechanisms.
A third direction concerns the conditions governing inclusive digital and productive innovation. Internet access, machine learning, entrepreneurship support, and aquaculture technologies address different resources and processes [6,7,8,9]. Research can evaluate the distribution of digital skills, unpaid care constraints, data access, financing terms, algorithmic bias, and the effective control of technologically enabled income. Such investigations should ask who designs the system, who benefits from the data generated, and who retains the right to challenge the automated or managerial decisions. Without this attention, digitalization may enhance calculability or efficiency while leaving structural inequality unaltered.
A fourth direction is to integrate SDG 5 into sustainability transitions rather than treating social inclusion as an ancillary commitment. The shipping-agency case and the study of clean-energy technologies suggest research on gender-sensitive GHG accounting, participation in decarbonization investment decisions, the design of organizational responsibilities, and equitable access to green jobs [12,13]. Comparable evidence across sectors would help distinguish the effects of technology, regulation, stakeholder mandates, and organizational hierarchies. In this area, future research should also investigate whether gender-inclusive governance improves the credibility and use of sustainability information, while avoiding assumptions that disclosure quality, operational carbon performance, and gender equality move together automatically.
Finally, comparative research should examine the structural and institutional limits of empowerment across geographical and social contexts. Differences between public and private labor markets, rural and urban economies, corporate and local-government governance, and periods of stability or crisis invite intersectional and context-aware approaches [10,11]. The contributions in this Special Issue illustrate both the breadth of research opportunities and the difficulty of translating results across settings. An ambitious agenda requires more consistent constructs and richer institutional explanations without suppressing the diversity of social experiences that make the achievement of SDG 5 a global challenge.
The contributions collected in “Gender Equality: Empowering Women and Girls for Sustainable Development” demonstrate that the scientific relevance of SDG 5 extends well beyond one sector, country, or policy domain. Taken together, the studies connect gender equality to corporate and public governance, financial resilience, economic opportunities, entrepreneurship, digitalization, food security, carbon accountability, and clean-energy transitions. Their collective value lies not in a single transferable numerical result but in the questions they make possible across organizational and institutional boundaries.
These contributions suggest that advancing SDG 5 requires moving beyond numerical representation, formal commitments and the disclosure of sustainability information. Future research should investigate who controls resources, participates in consequential decisions, shapes sustainability information and remains accountable for organizational outcomes. By examining these relationships, scholars can contribute to a more substantive understanding of gender equality within sustainable development.
Author Contributions
Writing—original draft preparation, A.D.V.; writing—review and editing, A.D.V., M.C. and L.L.; supervision, A.D.V. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.
Funding
This research received no external funding.
Institutional Review Board Statement
Not applicable. This Editorial does not report new research involving human participants or animals.
Informed Consent Statement
Not applicable.
Data Availability Statement
No new dataset was generated or analyzed for this Editorial; the ten articles discussed are publicly available through the Special Issue webpage (https://www.mdpi.com/journal/sustainability/special_issues/4H635O8068, accessed on 2 November 2026).
Acknowledgments
We sincerely thank all contributing authors for their valuable research and the reviewers for their thoughtful and constructive assessments. We are particularly grateful to Idiano D’Adamo for his valuable contribution to the organization and development of this Special Issue and for his continued support throughout the editorial process. His commitment to promoting fairness, impartiality, and scientific rigor contributed significantly to safeguarding the integrity of the editorial process and ensuring the scholarly quality and relevance of the contributions selected for publication. We also gratefully acknowledge the continuous assistance and professionalism of the journal’s editorial team throughout the development and completion of this Special Issue. The authors acknowledge the institutional and scientific support provided by the Blue Shipping & Cruise Laboratory (BSCLab), Department of Law, University of Naples “Parthenope”, Naples, Italy, in connection with the development and editorial activities of this Special Issue.
Conflicts of Interest
The authors served as Guest Editors of the Special Issue. A.D.V. is also a co-author of a research article included in the Special Issue [12].
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