Gendered emissions? Rethinking empowerment and environmental outcomes across income divides

This study seeks to test the hypothesis that gender empowerment impacts environmental outcomes by opening a window into the ways female legal and political representation affects carbon dioxide emissions in lower- and higher-income countries. The implementation of dynamic panel data models (Arellano-Bond GMM) reveals that emissions boast considerable persistence over time, with such persistence ranging from a lagged CO₂ term of 0.330 in lower-income to 0.396 in higher-income countries. Industrial activity in lower-income contexts is shown to be an emission driver, whereas population density is a prominent driver in higher-income contexts. The Women, Business and the Law index has a significant effect only in higher-income countries, driving up emissions by approximately 0.8 percent for each unit increase, which indicates that gender-inclusive legal structures go hand in hand with economic structures prone to high emissions in more developed economies. In contrast, the parliamentary share of women has a small yet significantly positive effect on emissions in lower-income countries only (coefficient of 0.006), suggesting another possibility that political representation may somehow lead to industrial development and its associated emissions during the early stages. No significant link is established for GDP growth in either income group whenever political representation is selected as the gender indicator, revealing that the growth-emission relationship actually varies depending on the gender measure selected. These results strongly suggest how gender empowerment interacts with emissions trajectories through myriad context-specific ways, and thus there is a clear call for integrated policy attention marrying the goals of gender equity and environmental sustainability.