Patrizia Tettamanzi

The aim of this paper is to understand which is the approach of women in business towards sustainability. Hence, two research questions have been answered: 1. What is the current state of literature regarding the commitment of female managers and entrepreneurs towards sustainability, and which are the main topics debated? 2. What are the future research directions according to current trends and further relevant issues? A “Systematic Literature Network Analysis” (SLNA) was performed combining a Systematic Literature Review with citations- and keywords-networks analysis, i.e. the main path of the biggest connected component, the Citation Score analysis and the co-occurrence of authors’ keywords analysis. Thanks to the citations analysis, four main clusters of emerged, i.e. studies on the Board of Directors’ (BoD) impact on sustainability commitment (1), performance (2), disclosure (3) and BoD diversity, personal characteristics and innovation (4). Instead, other issues emerged through the keywords analysis, i.e. the approach of gender-diverse BoD to CSR and sustainable development (1), the attitude of women entrepreneurs in developing contexts (2), emerging topics such as innovation, D&I and ESG (3) and the contexts of gender diversity studies (4). The main limitations are the use Scopus as only database and the eventual presence of subjectivity through the first steps of analysis or in the interpretation of findings. This paper contributes to literature being the first review on those topics, hence providing suggestions for future research and confirming the effectiveness of the SLNA in systematizing a broad research field and helping the location of future trends.