Same Practices, Different Outcomes: Gender Gaps in Organic Certification – new research study by Imre Fertő and Valéria Lekics in Sustainable Development

This paper examines gender differences in organic certification among Hungarian wineries and asks whether they reflect observable differences in sustainability engagement, organizational capabilities, and structural characteristics, or differences in how similar profiles translate into certified status. Using a 2022 cross-sectional survey, we estimate binary-response models and apply nonlinear Blinder–Oaxaca decomposition to separate the female–male certification gap into characteristics and coefficient/residual components. Female-managed wineries are more likely to hold organic certification than male-managed wineries, despite broadly similar reported green-practice adoption, managerial orientation, absorptive capacity, relational governance, education, and firm age. Observable characteristics explain little of the gap. Instead, the difference is concentrated in the coefficient/residual component, indicating a reduced-form residual difference in certification probabilities among wineries with similar observed profiles, rather than identifying its mechanism. Robustness checks using alternative link functions, land transformations, principal-component indices, and linear decomposition support this descriptive pattern. The findings highlight the need to distinguish reported sustainability practices from formal certification, especially in high-value agri-food sectors where certification also functions as a market signal. The results should be interpreted cautiously: the cross-sectional design, small female-managed subsample, and self-reported practice measures preclude causal identification.
The paper therefore identifies an unexplained certification-pattern difference and points to the need for longitudinal, process-level, and externally validated data on certification histories, advisory support, market channels, documentation practices, inspection experiences, and pathways through which sustainability practices become formally recognized.