The disclosure of intellectual capital in the sustainable reporting of Italian listed SMEs. Uncovering the materiality of gender equality among the ESG topics

Italian medium listed firms affected by the new sustainability legislation of the EU CSRD are characterized by a high incidence of intangible assets as intellectual capital (IC) weight as key drivers to achieve differentiation from their competitors and best use their resources to capture high market share. As IC disclosure supports the best transparency in its components as human, structural and relational capital, this article seeks to investigate the degree of disclosure of IC elements, gender materiality and ESG. This study uses qualitative content analysis to explore how corporate governance bodies of Italian medium-listed companies address IC and gender materiality in sustainability reporting. The estimation uses hand collected data disclosed by a sample of Italian medium listed firms from 2020 to 2024. This method systematically evaluates corporate disclosures, widely applied in accounting and corporate governance research. Using a content analysis, as the authors measure high IC with a weighted index, they can examine the determinants of high growth across different sub-index classes, composed by human, structural and relational components. The findings imply that the IC index relates positively to the firm’s high gender materiality and ESG determinants. By using the original standpoint of IC and deriving its sub-components, this article broadens the knowledge about IC disclosure and accounts for its relation and impact on gender materiality and ESG reporting, accounting and disclosure with CSRD legal constraint.