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Stocks Perform Better if Women Are on Company Boards

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Re: Stocks Perform Better if Women Are on Company Boards

#31

Post by kolinko »

einhverfr wrote: post #22
kolinko wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any scientific research to support that? Just because you can put a nice story behind a theory doesn't make it true.

Some if it ties in with this: 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…

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).

Re: Stocks Perform Better if Women Are on Company Boards

#32

Post by Tichy »

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.

Re: Stocks Perform Better if Women Are on Company Boards

#33

Post by JanezStupar »

kolinko wrote: post #28
JanezStupar wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 m…

Why did you assume I'm for mandatory quotas? 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 t…

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".

Re: Stocks Perform Better if Women Are on Company Boards

#34

Post by einhverfr »

kolinko wrote: post #31
einhverfr wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some if it ties in with this: 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…

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 m…

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.

Re: Stocks Perform Better if Women Are on Company Boards

#35

Post by einhverfr »

kolinko wrote: post #30
einhverfr wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If the Innuit doesn't know anything about the business, then there is a different issue.

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.

Re: Stocks Perform Better if Women Are on Company Boards

#36

Post by peteretep »

cremnob wrote: post #9
ChrisNorstrom wrote: post #5

" 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…

Where did the "women are less risky" thing come from? The Bundesbank published a paper about women bankers being riskier. http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/cd4a3ac0-77f6-11e1-b437-00144...

Maybe to succeed as a woman in a male-dominated environment like banking, you need to have high testosterone...

Re: Stocks Perform Better if Women Are on Company Boards

#37

Post by vacri »

nagrom wrote: post #29
vacri wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

though I agree the idea was poorly worded

Re: Stocks Perform Better if Women Are on Company Boards

#38

Post by roguecoder »

dinkumthinkum wrote: post #7

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 ev…

On the other hand, I find any of those interesting and news-worthy.

And regardless, I would be interested in seeing the performance of a fund based on % women on the board versus the general stock market.

Re: Stocks Perform Better if Women Are on Company Boards

#39

Post by roguecoder »

chroma wrote: post #10
Uchikoma wrote: post #3

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…

(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…

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.

Re: Stocks Perform Better if Women Are on Company Boards

#40

Post by slurgfest »

kolinko wrote: post #18
slurgfest wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 poin…

Any scientific research to support that? Just because you can put a nice story behind a theory doesn't make it true.

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

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