Of the top 500 pub­lic US com­pa­nies, firms with women in senior man­age­ment per­formed 18 to 69 per­cent bet­ter in terms of prof­itabil­ity than the median com­pa­nies in their indus­tries. Not only this, but these firms, with around three women in top jobs, scored higher on top mea­sures of organ­i­sa­tional excel­lence by at least 40 percent.

How­ever, as Robin Han­son notes over at Over­com­ing Bias:

[A]nyone who believed this result should expect to make big prof­its just by buy­ing female firms and sell­ing male firms.

If many stock spec­u­la­tors believed [this], firm stock prices would jump upon hir­ing more female execs, mak­ing most CEOS quite eager to hire more women execs.  There would be a boom in female execs […]  Since that didn’t hap­pen, I’ve gotta believe most spec­u­la­tors don’t believe those studies.

A cou­ple of thoughts:

  • For a start, this research was con­ducted on For­tune 500 com­pa­nies. Not exactly a diverse, or even large, sam­ple to find such cor­re­la­tions in.
  • Such research doesn’t say that female traits (or the lack of male traits) are con­ducive to suc­cess, but that diver­sity is key.
  • A firm lib­eral enough to have women in senior man­age­ment (and rightly so) is likely to be open to many other oppor­tu­ni­ties than a con­ser­v­a­tive firm.