Research from the University of Queensland Business School found that women appear to significantly enhance the monitoring capacity of the boards they join. Researchers found that boards with more female directors were characterized by greater participation of directors in decision-making, tougher CEO monitoring, and more alignment with the interests of the shareholders. (February 3, 2009)
Harvard Business Review reports that when star performers switch firms their performance often dims, along with their new company's market value. However, talented women who switch firms tend to maintain their stardom and their new employer's share price holds steady. The author, Boris Groysberg, identifies two reasons for this:
These strategies enable women to transition more successfully to new companies.
A study of Fortune 1000 companies highlights the difficulty of women to reach the top executive levels. While the recent appointments of women CEOs at PepsiCo, Kraft Foods and Anglo American have the appearance of increasing parity, looking to the executive pipeline shows a different story. The study forecasts that ten years from now, women will comprise just 6.2 percent of chief executives at the largest companies in the U.S. As Constance Helfat, at the Tuck School or Business at Dartmouth College and one of the study's authors says, “[e]ven though 6.2 percent is more than triple the current percentage, it doesn't seem very impressive when one considers that by 2016 it will have been about 40 years since women first entered corporate management in large numbers.” One of the key findings from the study is that in 2000 about half of Fortune 1000 companies did not have a woman in a position senior enough to be included in official SEC filings.
The Economist, in their “Guide to Womenomics”, outlines the impact of women on the global economy and states plainly “[t]he future of the world economy lies increasingly in female hands.” Women's presence in paid employment is higher than ever before in both the developed and developing worlds and has produced a sizeable portion of GDP growth. According to the article, since 1970 women have filled two new jobs for every one taken by a man. The article points out that women's increased participation in the workforce isn't just good for women's accomplishments as a whole, it is good from a company's perspective too. Research by Catalyst reveals that U.S. companies who have more women in senior management positions earned a higher return on equity than companies with fewer women in top spots. Other research has also shown that women are better at investing and earn higher returns than men. Education is also another area where increased participation by women bestows significant benefits on society.
The bottom line, as the article states, is that attracting more women to paid employment requires the recognition on the part of government and businesses that the right policies need to be in place to make this happen. Given that women continue to be more involved in child care, obstacles should be removed from women's ability to have and parents' needs to care for children. Even more succinctly put, “if women are to get out and power the global economy, it is surely only fair that men should at last do more of the housework.