Investigating the Quality of Gender Equality Non-Financial Information Disclosed in the Cooperative Credit Sector: A Case Study

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The paper is well written and provides interesting aspects concerning Italian CCBs. and CBG. I suggest to accept it in present form.

 

Author Response

We thank the reviewer for his work on our paper. the work has been revised in several places to improve its structure, understanding and clarify the content of the research. In particular, we reviewed the abstract, introduction, literature, methodology and Study implications and / or limitations. Following your suggestion, we sent the revised version of the paper to a mother tongue for a professional reading, to improve the paper's readability. Moreover, we carefully read the revised version of the paper to ensure that all concepts are clearly explained.

Reviewer 2 Report

Line 5 – The abstract is too long. All main points of your analysis are present but needs major rewriting for sense. It’s look like the introduction of a book and not of a research paper. I think you should summarize the main point of the research.

Line 94 – 95 – “should be the banks with a higher and better quality of financial and social information, unlike commercial banks”… Are you sure? The quality of the financial and non-financial disclosure of commercial banks is very high in Europe (and in Italian context). Moreover many Italian cooperative banks didn’t disclose non-financial information.

Line 119 – Why an in-depth analysis about Directive 95/2014 / EU and Legislative Decree 254/2016? Again, It’s look like the paragraph of a book and not a research paper. The same goes for “The role of the GRI Reporting Framework in drafting the NFS”.

Line 275 – It’s not a literature review, but a development of the research hypothesis.

Line 326 – “RQ1: Is the information on diversity reported in the NFS of the ICBG in compliance with the reference framework referred to in the document?” But NFS shouldn’t be approved by the auditor? In other words the disclosure is GRI compliant and therefore is quite similar to the standard you want to examine.

Line 348 – The title is written in Italian.

Line 372 – the analysis is poorly written: description of procedures missing or so unclear that others couldn’t reproduce study. For example, How did you do the content analysis?

Study implications and/or limitations are not mentioned, moreover you don’t emphasize how study advances knowledge or study does not advance knowledge.

Author Response

Please see the attachment

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

Dear authors, it seems that you have carefully considered the comments suggested in my previous review. All the questions have been treated in detail and the responses provided are satisfactory. The manuscript, as currently presented, is for me eligible for publication.