A piece published on the website of Justice for Men & Boys (and the women who love them), the political party of which I’m the chairman, in July 2019:

Enjoy. The study to which James Delingpole refers was published in The Leadership Quarterly three weeks ago – Women directors, firm performance, and firm risk: A causal perspective. The full Abstract:

Norway was the first of ten countries to legislate gender quotas for boards of publicly traded firms. There is considerable debate and mixed evidence concerning the implications of female board representation. In this paper, we explain the main sources of biases in the existing literature on the effects of women directors on firm performance and review methods to account for these biases. We address the endogeneity problem by using a difference-in-differences approach to study the effects of women directors on firm performance with specific consideration of the common trend assumption, and we explicitly distinguish between accounting-based (i.e., operating income divided by assets, return on assets) and market-based (i.e., market-to-book ratio and Tobin’s Q) performance measures in the Norwegian setting. The control group are firms from Finland, Sweden, and Denmark. We further extend the analysis of causal effects of women directors to firm risk. Our results imply a negative effect of mandated female representation on firm performance and on firm risk.

Published yesterday, Delingpole’s article has already attracted 391 comments. The most up-voted comment, from “Loose Cannon”:

If women’s executive abilities were being undervalued/underutilized, then enterprising female investors and leaders would arbitrage the discrepancy and create more female driven businesses. Same applies to the so-called gender pay gap which would signal employers to hire an all female workforce and reap the cost advantage.

Regular visitors to this website will be aware that in 2012 I gave evidence to House of Commons and House of Lords inquiries on behalf of Campaign for Merit in Business, confirming the causal link between increasing female representation on boards, and corporate financial decline. I’ve just added details of this new study to our short briefing paper with direct links to the studies confirming that causal link – here.

Along with Dr Catherine Hakim and Steve Moxon, I gave oral evidence to the House of Commons inquiry in 2012 – here (video, 56:50).

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