Empowering Women for Sustainable Economic Recovery: Optimizing Natural Resource Markets for Environmental Efficiency in the USA

The UN SDG 5 promotes gender equality and the empowerment of women and girls. Despite its focus on SDG 5 (Gender Equality), the study recognizes that empowering women supports numerous other SDGs. Gender equality's promotion of inclusive p boosts SDG 8 (Decent Work and Economic Growth) through increased productivity and innovation, SDG 9 (Industry, Innovation, and Infrastructure) through increased female representation in science and technology, SDG 12 (Responsible Consumption and Production) through more sustainable behavioral choices, and SDG 13 (Climate Action) through environmental awareness and policy advocacy. Empowering women is a systemic driver for social, economic, and environmental sustainability. The lack of gender parity in governance is counterproductive to long-term goals. Based on the key facts, the study filled a research gap by including various predictors of women's autonomy that aid in managing a country's environmental and natural resources in the United States by using a period of 1975–2023. The asymmetric relationship between women's autonomy factors, ecological footprints, and ores and metal exports was discovered using the nonlinear autoregressive distributed lag (NARDL) model. Further, Granger causality test is used for causal inferences between the variables. The NARDL estimates show that increasing the women's sovereignty index is beneficial in the short and long run for reducing ecological footprints and conserving ores and metal exports. Furthermore, advanced female education's positive and negative shocks reduce environmental footprints through political wisdom. The Granger causality estimates show that ecological footprints cause of to increase  advanced female education, whereas negative shocks of advanced female education cause women's sovereignty. The findings confirmed the viability of asymmetric causation between the variables mentioned during the specified period. The country needs to include women in its main policy plans to protect the environment and natural resources for green and clean development.