Digitalization and gendered intellectual capital among ESG topics. Evidence from sustainability reports of Italian listed SMEs

Digital technologies are crucial in implementing ESG strategies and increasing ESG performance and competitiveness as they provide opportunities to increase management, monitoring and reporting of environmental social and governance impacts by fostering technological innovation and intellectual capital (IC). Italian listed SMEs attentive to sustainability reporting are characterized by a great incidence of IC as key driver of differentiation from their competitors to increase market share. As IC disclosure in its components of human, structural and relational capital supports company transparency. This article investigates the degree of integration between the disclosure of IC and sustainability reporting highlighting the technological elements of IC that enable enterprises to achieve competitive advantage and whether the gender dimension of human, relational and structural capital has been disentangled from the overall disclosure of IC as a material matter among the ESG reporting topics. By using the content analysis on hand-collected data, we explore how corporate governance bodies of Italian listed SMEs address the disclosure on IC, technological elements of IC and gender materiality in sustainability reporting of a sample of Italian listed medium enterprises from 2020 to 2024. We measure IC with a weighted index and examine the determinants of IC growth across sub-index classes composed of human, structural and relational capital. The findings reveal that the IC index positively relates to the firm’s gender materiality and ESG determinants. The article broadens the knowledge about digital technologies and IC disclosure in sustainability reporting and accounts for its relationship with gender materiality among ESG topics under the CSRD legal constraints.