We added more coherent theoretical arguments to the discussion based on the most recently published relevant academic papers on the topic (lines 125-133, 153-158, 442-452). The incorporated studies include Yarram and Adapa (2021), Boukattaya and Omri (2021), Shakil (2021), Wang, Wilson & Li, (2021), Cordeiro et al 2020, Birindelli, et al. (2019), and Nuber & Velte (2021). In total, the list of references increased from 21 to 36. The details of these studies and the logic behind their inclusion are explained in the text (pages 3 and 4). For the quantitative papers, our guiding line is the inclusion of papers proposing a reliable strategy to address the problem of endogeneity characterizing virtually all studies dealing with gender diversity. In a nutshell, gender diversity and firms’ performances (be they financial, ESG or environmental) have reverse causality. More gender-diverse boards are found to improve firms’ performances, and at the same time, better performing firms are more attractive to females. Any study incorporating these two variables would suffer from endogeneity. Therefore, inference and results are biased. Finding an instrument for gender diversity becomes a concern of first importance. The task is challenging as all potential candidates for being a suitable instrument should be already part of the regression equation. So far, the literature has not found an instrument unanimously agreed upon. This is the reason for which our selection of papers is rather limited. We focused on those papers with a choice of instrumental variables that are well explained and papers that ‘’go around’’ the problem by making use of a method that does not rely on external instruments. This includes papers using difference-GMM or system-GMM estimators. Their principal advantage is the use of internal instruments instead of external ones. Indeed, the instruments chosen are difference and the level of the covariates themselves. There are only a few of these studies available, including ours. This again explains the relatively restricted number of references we are considering.
3- Please reconsider the use of adjectives such as "complicated" (line 79), interestingly (line 88) and so on.