[jlees]

Lemma: Women-led companies are desirable.

Vivek Wadhwa is doing a bunch of research into the data. I don't have his report at my fingertips but fundamentally, not investing in women is not a rational move. Here's the media headline version:

"Women-led private technology companies are more capital-efficient, achieve 35 percent higher return on investment, and, when venture-backed, bring in 12 percent higher revenue than male-owned tech companies."

Source: http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-02-20/women-who-ru...

Conclusion: Women earn over 50% of degrees but start fewer than 3% of companies. If we accept that women-led companies do well, as per the data -- and yes, there are certainly caveats -- then this gap clearly shows there is a problem, in terms of inefficient use of investment if nothing else.

[FeeTinesAMady]

Hypothetically, that could be completely accounted for by women being more realistic of their chances of success at starting a company. So those who wouldn't have succeeded never bothered in the first place, skewing those statistics.

[jlees]

Not all women-led companies were started by women, too.

[klipt]

Correlation is not causation.

[jlees]

In this instance, the outcome is still desirable. If isolating fairly across all variables (and there are several at play!) means that higher company performance is tightly correlated to having a diverse leadership team, it's a competitive benefit to take advantage of that correlation. I doubt we could ever truly prove causation in this instance.