Whilst a attention grabbing headline article I'd be more interested in a better breakdown and also a more uptodate one given "according to a report by the Credit Suisse Research Institute, created in 2008 to analyze trends expected to affect global markets.". So thats 2008, four years ago. Things have moved on, but why is this only now making the news?
Diversity is always good and the size of boards, statisticaly for them to not have one single women would be indicative of a narror mindset and also one that is less able to adapt - period. So in that this is hardly supprising in any way.
Not a greatly written article and I say that as they quote a 2008 report and then go on about companies who were not even a factor in 2008, which to me seems somewhat attention news based. Still simple fact that say a board of 12 people has no women and fails to adapt as well as a board that has some is perhaps obvious to me and many others. Now the question I'd ask is if you had a all women board would they perform as well and if that was the case, then I'd say the battle of the sex's is over and women won at board level. Sadly there isn't enough data to even touch upon that question, one day. Still I'd like to see boards made up of people who can do the job, nomatter there sex, preferences, colour or whatever. But I also understand the bias's and hurdles many face and in that I'm all for boards having women on them, I just hope it is done for the right reasons and not a case of we saw some old report and now need a token women to make our shares look good approach.
One last thought, those who are on boards, clearly are exceptional people as they have had to stand out above the many forms of descrimination that legacy has to offer. So is it becasue there women or just exceptional good at what they do and in that measuring things and putting a sex label on it is in many ways the kind of mentality that has limited many women getting to were they deserve.
Not only cause and correlation but what's the cause?
Do companies with women on their board perform better, or do companies that perform better take women into their boards.
Do companies that have the mindset to take on less dept, have the mindset to encourage women to take board positions, or do companies with women in board positions get a mindset to take on less dept.
Do companies that perform better take on less dept or do companies that take on less dept perform better.
The article is inconclusive for me.
(I personally think women in director positions are a good thing because an all-men board obviously can't consist of the best people available)
A merit-based company doesn't care about genitals, whereas a boys' club company cuts out 50% of potentially meritorious workers (though I agree the idea was poorly worded)
A board that must necessarily select only men may not be composed of the best people available, but a board that happens to consist only of men may, in fact, have the best people available...looking a posteriori at a group's gender composition is not very helpful.
(I personally think women in director positions are a good thing because an all-men board obviously can't consist of the best people available)
I don't want to turn this into a flame war about gender, but this does not seem obvious to me. It's certainly not the case in other fields. For example, the best mathematicians are predominantly male. (No female has ever won the Fields Medal or Abel Prize.) The same goes for computer science (only two women have won the Turing Award).
I'm not saying there's no inertia or social dynamics involved, but publicly-traded companies have large incentives to select the best board members they can find. Considering these incentives, a massive imbalance would make sense if one gender was better at running public companies.
To be the devil's advocate (I do NOT seriously defend sexism) why does the cause matter if you are looking for the best person? If women are almost always better potters in Norway, and you must make pots in Norway, then it makes sense that you would hire a lot of women.
That does not imply that the best male mathematicians or computer scientists were male: it suggests the most widely-recognized such were. That's like saying the best writers are mostly European because that's where most of the Nobel prizes for literature have been awarded. By the time you have gotten to that prize you have gone through a large number of potentially-biased filters.
If men were better at running companies, companies that hired women would have worse performance, the opposite of what was observed. It is far more likely that men are in charge because they always have been and such decisions are made by humans with systematic cultural prejudices. In fact, such prejudice can explain gendered difference in advancement. For example, see http://www.west-info.eu/files/SSRN-id2018259.pdf about how men with stay-at-home wives denied women opportunities for promotion and saw companies that employed women as less successful than those that didn't.
I don't understand how an all-male board obviously implies not having the best people available. Doesn't that mean that for any group of any size of only males, there exists at least one woman that is better at at least one of their jobs?
I don't see how that's a given.
(I should have refreshed sooner, it appears I wasn't the only one to make this point)
Well, not necessarily suck, but aren't using the full potential of the population.
There are plenty of men who could be perfect social workers, or stay-at-home dads, but instead waste their potential, because "it's a woman's job" and "the man should bring money home".
I just can't subscribe to the notion that "god" is walking around with a measuring instrument and carefully distributing talents in a 50% manner.
Or that solely due to one's talents a person is obliged to "serve the society" in hers designated role.
Do I believe that diversity is good? Hell yeah!
Do I believe that enforcing mandatory quotas is the way to improve overall quality? Hell no.
If anything we should spend more resources on overall quality. And I am really afraid that this focus on females will cost us dearly. There is a lot of evidence that we are losing whole generations of boys. How is (not intentionally, mind you) making men feebler going to help society is beyond my comprehension.
The only thing I'm saying is that a plenty of people get pushed by society into suboptimal life choices.
Mutiple research from various countries says that girls are as good at math/computer skills as boys, up to the graduation from high schools.
After high school they don't choose science in universities though. Why could that be? If the distribution of talent is exactly the same in high school within boys & girls, I'd expect that they'd pick similar directions at universities.
If they don't, it means that some of them waste their talents.
I don't believe mandatory quotas are the solutions, I'm all against it. But I think we've got a problem, because we could have twice as many great programmers, and great scientists.
I did not assume that you are for mandatory quotas.
It was more of a general remark, since a lot of times the talk of gender equality is thinly veiled advocacy for mandatory gender quotas.
And I believe that (honest) gender equality advocates should be hell bent against mandatory quotas and not accepting them as "better state of affairs" or a "temporary compromise".
> It was more of a general remark, since a lot of times the talk of gender equality is thinly veiled advocacy for mandatory gender quotas.
Really? Honestly, the only people I see talking about gender quotas are the people who are fervently against them, which is why I suspect kolinko took your comment about gender quotas the way they did.
"So is it because they're women or just exceptionally good at what they do?"
Both. Women are biologically known to diversify their risks much more than men. Both in life and in business. Companies started by women have a much smaller chance of failing and reach profitability much sooner. Female business owners are more steady and less risky. Male business owners tend to take more risk, thus getting ahead faster but at the cost of failing much faster as well. The reason we don't see big companies started by women is that taking "crazy risks" are usually a masculine trait caused by testosterone. And in order to win quickly you have to take a lot more risk. When women are administered testosterone they become more aggressive, masculine in risk taking analysis, and violent. In both men and women, the more testosterone the subject's body produces the more violent, aggressive, commanding, and confident the subject is. These findings from many studies over the course of decades. From testosterone injections in women to checking the testosterone levels of prison inmates (surprise! the most violent inmates had the highest levels of testosterone). Testosterone provides a boost in confidence and dominance but as a side effect a boost in violence and aggression. This also explains why men who hold children, even if it's a doll, had immediate decreases in testosterone levels. It's a sort of evolutionary response to try to prevent men from harming their offspring. Historicall, almost every war or genocide in human history was caused, planned, and carried out exclusively by men.
People don't like hearing those studies, they like to think that they're in control of their own life and are not slaves to their gender, genitals, or hormones. But the evidence clearly shows that we are not as much in control of ourselves as we think we are.
Too many men, like too much testosterone, is not a good thing. (see - testosterone's role in wallstreet's collapse http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-05-31/managing-wal...) In the old economy [More risk = higher rewards] so the men won that round. Of course the worldwide economic slump is changing that. Right now it's more important to slowly grow your company safely, plan for the long term instead of the short term, and keep the company you have while growing slowly. The only two groups of people that are more prone to follow those rules are 1) women and 2)men with low testosterone levels.
So in this economic downturn women are really going to shine, which is hopefully going to open the door to more opportunities in government and leadership positions. I for one am very happy to see this, we've seen what the men have done/caused, it's time to see how the women will handle things.
I can't speak to the application in business. It's a well established idea in biology.
Females invest more biologically in eggs and pregnancy. Men may have many more children than women but also have greater risk of having none. Similar patterns show up in lots of areas. At human conception there are significantly more males than females, at birth they are close to 50/50 - males are more fragile. Even after that point, on average, men take more risks, die earlier and are more likely to be murdered.
So again, I don't have expertise to know what any of this has to do with who should run a company, the correlation may be extremely dodgy; but men are at a biological level riskier critters than women.
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/105013.php at least regarding sex at conception. I am not entirely sure about whether we really have hard direct data regarding sex at conception but that's one possibility regarding that data. On the other hand, it's possible that there are biological differences between sperm carrying X and Y chromosomes and that these might be selected for one way or another.
However, trans-historically (closer to my field of expertise) it is generally true that men take on riskier endeavors than women do, and that women follow as areas develop. Frontiers generally tend to be nearly exclusively male (at one point the Wild West had a gender ratio of 50 men per woman, and this is not isolated. Consider the early classical practice of having the men march off in search of fortune, for example.
The thing to keep in mind here is that women have a narrower window of opportunity to start a family than men do. If you are 40 and male, and you are not married, you could still get married to a younger woman and have kids, but if you are 40 and female, you are less likely to be able to have kids. Therefore men can generally better afford to move into immature markets and riskier endeavors than women can.
Well, I think the question is not whether an average woman is more or less risky than an average man, but whether an average woman banker/manager is more or less risky than an average man on that position.
Think of that one woman per 50 man on the Wild West. How tolerant to risk must she have been to go to a dangerous land populated mostly by men. All of her family must've told her to stay home, and she had no role models to follow.
Also, you mentioned that in biology it's well established that women are (inherently?) less adventurous than man. You've got research which talks about sex at conception, but I was asking about a research which proves that any such relation persists beyond conception and is not a result of sociological effects (because we're talking biology here).
Well, I wasn't the one who brought up biology and in fact in my brief mention suggested there were some questions.
The larger issue is trans-historicly men tend to be, well, pioneers, and women tend to follow and build civilization. To the extent that there is a biological inherent risk aspect, it is because of differences in timeframes to establish a family. Men and women are different in this regard biologically. Men can have kids when relatively old while women cannot.
For this reason if you expect someone to take risks while young, this favors men over women, particularly if the risk is that one might not be as established by the time one is, say, 30 years old. It is different, for example, to require an extensive post-doc program followed by a lengthy tenure track in order to get a coveted academic position if you are a man and can delay getting married and having kids than if you are a woman.
I wasn't saying anything about business. I was saying something about biology. It's up to you to find what evidence there is for the claim in business. If you want to know about biology, read a biology textbook instead of downvoting people for things you don't like to hear.
This is not cutting edge, nor is it remotely original with me, nor is it controversial; go look in an introductory textbook. It's been years since I was in classes about this, all I have done is point out that the idea was not just fabricated on the spot by someone on HN.
It's appalling that textbook evolutionary biology gets downvotes as if it were some sort of angry screed or political controversy
"Too many men, like too much testosterone, is not a good thing."
Men built the entire world we live in today. Women's contribution to this has been negligible and inconsequential.
If every women from the dawn of time to the present day had been solely constrained to their proper duties of child-raising and home-keeping (which for the most part is actually the case), the world we live in today would basically be exactly the same, if not better.
If most men had been prevented from contributing to society and reaching their full potential we would still be living in caves.
I've read studies that corroborate your assertions, but it would really behoove you when making such specific assertions to link citations if at all possible, and not assume your audience is on the same page.
Wow, I think anyone with any basic logic course under their belt can see many cause and effect fallacies going on here. I'd expect a little more from Bloomberg.
Is it that they perform better because there are women on the board, that women make better decision, or that companies that perform better are more likely to also have women on the board? It could be any number of things and any reasonable person wouldn't even need these things spelled out for them.
If mixing perspectives is better for boards, does it mean they would benefit from putting more anarchists, Inuits and children on board? They also deliver other perspectives.
You know, Quakers still give children over a certain age (depending on meeting, maybe 7) full veto power over meeting business. And anarchists might have some helpful insights. I don't know what you have against Inuits though.
I'd say that if you'd bring in an average Inuit into a board meeting, you'd have some language problems, and you'd have to explain a lot of things to him.
My argument is that there is such a thing as "too much diversity" - if a group that has to make some kind of a decision is too diverse, it will have communication problems. Therefore it's not as simple as saying "oh, anything that brings in more diversity is better for a board".
World wide? So among other questions to come to mind, maybe companies in some countries happened to perform better than in other countries. For example if companies in liberal countries performed better, they would be likely to also have more female board members.
42 comments
[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 95.6 ms ] threadDiversity is always good and the size of boards, statisticaly for them to not have one single women would be indicative of a narror mindset and also one that is less able to adapt - period. So in that this is hardly supprising in any way.
Not a greatly written article and I say that as they quote a 2008 report and then go on about companies who were not even a factor in 2008, which to me seems somewhat attention news based. Still simple fact that say a board of 12 people has no women and fails to adapt as well as a board that has some is perhaps obvious to me and many others. Now the question I'd ask is if you had a all women board would they perform as well and if that was the case, then I'd say the battle of the sex's is over and women won at board level. Sadly there isn't enough data to even touch upon that question, one day. Still I'd like to see boards made up of people who can do the job, nomatter there sex, preferences, colour or whatever. But I also understand the bias's and hurdles many face and in that I'm all for boards having women on them, I just hope it is done for the right reasons and not a case of we saw some old report and now need a token women to make our shares look good approach.
One last thought, those who are on boards, clearly are exceptional people as they have had to stand out above the many forms of descrimination that legacy has to offer. So is it becasue there women or just exceptional good at what they do and in that measuring things and putting a sex label on it is in many ways the kind of mentality that has limited many women getting to were they deserve.
Do companies with women on their board perform better, or do companies that perform better take women into their boards.
Do companies that have the mindset to take on less dept, have the mindset to encourage women to take board positions, or do companies with women in board positions get a mindset to take on less dept.
Do companies that perform better take on less dept or do companies that take on less dept perform better.
The article is inconclusive for me.
(I personally think women in director positions are a good thing because an all-men board obviously can't consist of the best people available)
I don't want to turn this into a flame war about gender, but this does not seem obvious to me. It's certainly not the case in other fields. For example, the best mathematicians are predominantly male. (No female has ever won the Fields Medal or Abel Prize.) The same goes for computer science (only two women have won the Turing Award).
I'm not saying there's no inertia or social dynamics involved, but publicly-traded companies have large incentives to select the best board members they can find. Considering these incentives, a massive imbalance would make sense if one gender was better at running public companies.
If men were better at running companies, companies that hired women would have worse performance, the opposite of what was observed. It is far more likely that men are in charge because they always have been and such decisions are made by humans with systematic cultural prejudices. In fact, such prejudice can explain gendered difference in advancement. For example, see http://www.west-info.eu/files/SSRN-id2018259.pdf about how men with stay-at-home wives denied women opportunities for promotion and saw companies that employed women as less successful than those that didn't.
I don't see how that's a given.
(I should have refreshed sooner, it appears I wasn't the only one to make this point)
Does that mean that education, social sciences, social care and healthcare suck because they obviously don't consist of the best people available?
There are plenty of men who could be perfect social workers, or stay-at-home dads, but instead waste their potential, because "it's a woman's job" and "the man should bring money home".
Or that solely due to one's talents a person is obliged to "serve the society" in hers designated role.
Do I believe that diversity is good? Hell yeah!
Do I believe that enforcing mandatory quotas is the way to improve overall quality? Hell no.
If anything we should spend more resources on overall quality. And I am really afraid that this focus on females will cost us dearly. There is a lot of evidence that we are losing whole generations of boys. How is (not intentionally, mind you) making men feebler going to help society is beyond my comprehension.
The only thing I'm saying is that a plenty of people get pushed by society into suboptimal life choices.
Mutiple research from various countries says that girls are as good at math/computer skills as boys, up to the graduation from high schools. After high school they don't choose science in universities though. Why could that be? If the distribution of talent is exactly the same in high school within boys & girls, I'd expect that they'd pick similar directions at universities.
If they don't, it means that some of them waste their talents.
I don't believe mandatory quotas are the solutions, I'm all against it. But I think we've got a problem, because we could have twice as many great programmers, and great scientists.
It was more of a general remark, since a lot of times the talk of gender equality is thinly veiled advocacy for mandatory gender quotas.
And I believe that (honest) gender equality advocates should be hell bent against mandatory quotas and not accepting them as "better state of affairs" or a "temporary compromise".
Really? Honestly, the only people I see talking about gender quotas are the people who are fervently against them, which is why I suspect kolinko took your comment about gender quotas the way they did.
Both. Women are biologically known to diversify their risks much more than men. Both in life and in business. Companies started by women have a much smaller chance of failing and reach profitability much sooner. Female business owners are more steady and less risky. Male business owners tend to take more risk, thus getting ahead faster but at the cost of failing much faster as well. The reason we don't see big companies started by women is that taking "crazy risks" are usually a masculine trait caused by testosterone. And in order to win quickly you have to take a lot more risk. When women are administered testosterone they become more aggressive, masculine in risk taking analysis, and violent. In both men and women, the more testosterone the subject's body produces the more violent, aggressive, commanding, and confident the subject is. These findings from many studies over the course of decades. From testosterone injections in women to checking the testosterone levels of prison inmates (surprise! the most violent inmates had the highest levels of testosterone). Testosterone provides a boost in confidence and dominance but as a side effect a boost in violence and aggression. This also explains why men who hold children, even if it's a doll, had immediate decreases in testosterone levels. It's a sort of evolutionary response to try to prevent men from harming their offspring. Historicall, almost every war or genocide in human history was caused, planned, and carried out exclusively by men.
People don't like hearing those studies, they like to think that they're in control of their own life and are not slaves to their gender, genitals, or hormones. But the evidence clearly shows that we are not as much in control of ourselves as we think we are.
Too many men, like too much testosterone, is not a good thing. (see - testosterone's role in wallstreet's collapse http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-05-31/managing-wal...) In the old economy [More risk = higher rewards] so the men won that round. Of course the worldwide economic slump is changing that. Right now it's more important to slowly grow your company safely, plan for the long term instead of the short term, and keep the company you have while growing slowly. The only two groups of people that are more prone to follow those rules are 1) women and 2)men with low testosterone levels.
So in this economic downturn women are really going to shine, which is hopefully going to open the door to more opportunities in government and leadership positions. I for one am very happy to see this, we've seen what the men have done/caused, it's time to see how the women will handle things.
http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/cd4a3ac0-77f6-11e1-b437-00144...
Females invest more biologically in eggs and pregnancy. Men may have many more children than women but also have greater risk of having none. Similar patterns show up in lots of areas. At human conception there are significantly more males than females, at birth they are close to 50/50 - males are more fragile. Even after that point, on average, men take more risks, die earlier and are more likely to be murdered.
So again, I don't have expertise to know what any of this has to do with who should run a company, the correlation may be extremely dodgy; but men are at a biological level riskier critters than women.
Just because you can put a nice story behind a theory doesn't make it true.
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/105013.php at least regarding sex at conception. I am not entirely sure about whether we really have hard direct data regarding sex at conception but that's one possibility regarding that data. On the other hand, it's possible that there are biological differences between sperm carrying X and Y chromosomes and that these might be selected for one way or another.
However, trans-historically (closer to my field of expertise) it is generally true that men take on riskier endeavors than women do, and that women follow as areas develop. Frontiers generally tend to be nearly exclusively male (at one point the Wild West had a gender ratio of 50 men per woman, and this is not isolated. Consider the early classical practice of having the men march off in search of fortune, for example.
The thing to keep in mind here is that women have a narrower window of opportunity to start a family than men do. If you are 40 and male, and you are not married, you could still get married to a younger woman and have kids, but if you are 40 and female, you are less likely to be able to have kids. Therefore men can generally better afford to move into immature markets and riskier endeavors than women can.
Think of that one woman per 50 man on the Wild West. How tolerant to risk must she have been to go to a dangerous land populated mostly by men. All of her family must've told her to stay home, and she had no role models to follow.
Also, you mentioned that in biology it's well established that women are (inherently?) less adventurous than man. You've got research which talks about sex at conception, but I was asking about a research which proves that any such relation persists beyond conception and is not a result of sociological effects (because we're talking biology here).
The larger issue is trans-historicly men tend to be, well, pioneers, and women tend to follow and build civilization. To the extent that there is a biological inherent risk aspect, it is because of differences in timeframes to establish a family. Men and women are different in this regard biologically. Men can have kids when relatively old while women cannot.
For this reason if you expect someone to take risks while young, this favors men over women, particularly if the risk is that one might not be as established by the time one is, say, 30 years old. It is different, for example, to require an extensive post-doc program followed by a lengthy tenure track in order to get a coveted academic position if you are a man and can delay getting married and having kids than if you are a woman.
It's appalling that textbook evolutionary biology gets downvotes as if it were some sort of angry screed or political controversy
Men built the entire world we live in today. Women's contribution to this has been negligible and inconsequential.
If every women from the dawn of time to the present day had been solely constrained to their proper duties of child-raising and home-keeping (which for the most part is actually the case), the world we live in today would basically be exactly the same, if not better.
If most men had been prevented from contributing to society and reaching their full potential we would still be living in caves.
Is it that they perform better because there are women on the board, that women make better decision, or that companies that perform better are more likely to also have women on the board? It could be any number of things and any reasonable person wouldn't even need these things spelled out for them.
Additionally if a business is seen as a riskier investment does this mean that women would be less interested in investing time/money in it?
My argument is that there is such a thing as "too much diversity" - if a group that has to make some kind of a decision is too diverse, it will have communication problems. Therefore it's not as simple as saying "oh, anything that brings in more diversity is better for a board".
If the business is drilling for oil in the Arctic, I think the average Innuit would have something important to say, though.
But how many average anything do you see on boards of directors, I wonder.
And regardless, I would be interested in seeing the performance of a fund based on % women on the board versus the general stock market.