[alid]

This is such an important issue, and it affects bottom line! - a recent Forbes article highlighted that companies with more women at senior levels earn upwards of 33% more on important financial metrics.

Global research group Catalyst recently interviewed 325 American chief executives and 10,000 female executives around the obstacles to womens' progression into senior leadership roles. 52% of women cited male stereotyping, but only 25% of the male chief executives identified it as a problem - so there's definitely unconscious stereotyping at play.

[spindritf]

> companies with more women at senior levels earn upwards of 33% more on important financial metrics

There are two major problems with that. First is that it's just correlation, "greener" companies also do better but it's quite likely that they simply can afford to be greener.

Second why is no one buying that? I mean, if companies with many women at senior levels really did significantly better, speculators would bet on those companies, their stock prices would jump and there would be a boom for female execs (http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/07/femfirmfinance.html). That is not happening.

[btilly]

I did not see that article, but would be interested to. Do you have a link?

The only research that I am aware of along those lines was specific to South Korea.

[alid]

Hey man, here's the link: http://www.forbes.com/sites/forbeswomanfiles/2012/01/26/the-...

"Companies with more women at senior levels earn upwards of 33% more on important financial metrics. Failure to resolve the obstacles that keep women from these roles means executives are leaving money on the table."

[btilly]

They unfortunately do not source that stat.

The South Korean study that I'm aware of is described at http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/6498.html and found that a 10% increase in women managers was associated with a 1% return on assets. There is every reason to believe that this effect is stronger in South Korea than in the USA, and there is no way to get near the quoted 33% more with that measured effect.

[alid]

Try this one then - an in-depth, fact-based, study by McKinsey & Company: http://www.mckinsey.com/locations/swiss/news_publications/pd... "Statistically significant studies show that companies with a higher proportion of women on their management committees are also the companies that have the best performance."

[btilly]

Interesting. The key things that stand out to me from that are the following:

1. They are analyzing the impact of having women in top management. The Korean study looked at women in middle management, where they presumably have less of an impact on overall corporate direction.

2. The Korean study was looking at companies in a single relatively uniform economy. The McKinsey data set looks at companies across a variety of different countries with different economies and cultures. There are very strong correlations between which country a company is in, and whether it had women in the boardroom.

3. The McKinsey study identified a number of specific reasonable reasons why awareness of a female perspective could be beneficial for companies. If you're in a consumer line of business, those reasons are worth paying attention to.

Do you know whether McKinsey tried to crunch the numbers to estimate how much of the difference in economic performance can reasonably be attributed to having women in the board room versus the company being in a country whose economy did well? (Yes, I'm aware that there might well be a correlation between gender equality and the country's economic performance. Getting conclusions out of real world data sets will always be ugly and messy.)

[waterlesscloud]

I would be very curious to see actual data (not hand-wavy conjecture) as to why that would happen.

Most of what I've seen in that area is merely stereotyping of a different sort (women work by consensus etc).

[bcoates]

Is it that surprising that there are a lot of good ol' boy companies and that they are perverse in ways beyond just not hiring women?

I don't think anyone is seriously claiming that women are automatically better executives.