"What changes with women in the boardroom?" Blames men for wall street problems, then says men "don't get" that women leaders need flexibility and shorter hours so that they can prioritize other activities. For the same pay, of course.

Number357 · 2013-10-24T01:00:15+00:00

Yeah, men want those things too. I most likely could be making at least 3x what I'm making now, but I wanted more flexibility and shorter hours. It's not discrimination, it's economics.

tallwheel · 2013-10-24T01:20:00+00:00

Yeah. I want a cushy, flexible job with a huge salary too. Why can't everyone else just give me what I want!!!!1!

TracyMorganFreeman · 2013-10-23T23:50:37+00:00

I think more accurately women who make such claims don't understand economics.

ptr1492 · 2013-10-24T06:29:46+00:00

Ridiculous. Saw a great, evidence-based comment in refutation of this nonsense by a female user, but it appears as though it's been deleted or is awaiting moderation because I can't find it anymore! Luckily I copied it:

Stacy Morrow

Here we go again with more bad research and fallacious post hoc reasoning about women on corporate boards. I've heard the same awful, disproven arguments repeated with such frequency that I'm going to provide references and quotes with the hope that maybe some people actually do some real research.

"Catalyst, a nonprofit focused on expanding opportunities for women (read: advocacy group) in the workplace, conducted the first study looking at whether companies with more women in senior leadership roles perform better financially...It's pretty well established that companies that have more women in their senior leadership on average financially outperform companies with fewer women, and similarly in their board of directors,' Lang said."

Not according to Prof. Susan Vinnicombe at CICWL, who even admits the research is flawed:

"There has been quite a push in the past – indeed, we ourselves have engaged in such research – to look at the relationship between having women on corporate boards and financial performance. We do not subscribe to this research. We have shared it with chairmen and they do not think that it makes sense. We agree that it does not make sense. You cannot correlate two or three women on a massive corporate board with a return on investment, return on equity, turnover or profits. We have dropped such research in the past five years and I am pleased to say that Catalyst, which claims to have done a ground-breaking study on this in the US, officially dropped this line of argument last September."

The relationship is correleational, not causal. More sucessful companies simply add more women to their boards in an effort to "socially experiment." Reseachers in this area call this "tokenism." There are plenty of recent studies with proper controls that completely contradict this fallacious argument.

From Kenneth Ahern and Amy Dittmar's paper "The changing of the boards: The impact on firm valuation of mandated female board representation.":

"In 2003, a new law required that 40 percent of Norwegian firms’ directors be women – at the time only nine percent of directors were women. We use the pre-quota cross-sectional variation in female board representation to instrument for exogenous changes to corporate boards following the quota. We find that the constraint imposed by the quota caused a significant drop in the stock price at the announcement of the law and a large decline in Tobin’s Q over the following years, consistent with the idea that firms choose boards to maximize value. The quota led to younger and less experienced boards, increases in leverage and acquisitions, and deterioration in operating performance, consistent with less capable boards..." (Ahern & Dittmar 2012).

According to Dr. Alice Eagly: "Correlations between proportions of women in high-level positions and firm performance do not prove a causal relation because they encompass statistical anomalies such as reverse causation, omitted variables, selection biases, and unreliable measures (Antonakis, Bendahan, Jacquart, & Lalive, 2010). Therefore, it is perhaps not surprising that newer research undertaken by economists who use sophisticated controls for such confounds has not necessarily found that female leadership promotes corporate financial success (for review, see O’Reilly & Main, 2012)."

Studies of interest:

Adams, R. B., & Ferreira, D. (2009). Women in the boardroom and their impact on governance and performance. Journal of Financial Economics, 94, 291-309.

Ahern, K., & Dittmar, A. (2012). The changing of the boards: The impact on firm valuation of mandated female board representation. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 127, 137-197.

Antonakis, J., Bendahan, S., Jacquart, P., & Lalive, R. (2010). On making causal claims: A review and recommendations. The Leadership Quarterly, 21, 1086-1120

O’Reilly, C. A., III, & Main, B. G. M. (2012). Women in the boardroom: Symbols or substance? Research Paper No. 2098, Stanford Graduate School of Business.

van Dijk, H., van Engen, M. L., & van Knippenberg, D. (2012). Defying conventional wisdom: A meta-analytical examination of the differences between demographic and job-related diversity relationships with performance. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 119, 38-53. doi:10.1016/j.obhdp.2012.06.003

Please, stop making these same, disproven, and illogical arguments about women's presence on boards and corporate performance, and claiming that it's "consensus" or solid research. The research DOES NOT support this line of reasoning.

melb22 · 2013-10-24T08:35:50+00:00

Interesting that when it suits them feminists will claim that men and women have no significant differences and that it is sexist to claim that such differences exist, but then you get articles like this which push the line that women are both different to and better than men to the point that female board members would have stopped the economic crisis, raised profits etc.

(Principal Skinner grapples with this same issue about a minute into this clip)

gopher88 · 2013-10-24T04:30:34+00:00

From the comments

"The courts have never been on the side of women. Even when they are the victims of assault or rape. A rape trial isn't a trial for a rapist; it's a trial to see if a woman deserved to be raped. Don't get it twisted."

justdothedada · 2013-10-24T12:10:24+00:00

Garden City Group's revenues have doubled since 2009 to $200 million. I think this is has more to do with them benefiting from the financial crisis being a company that specializes in bankruptcy cases and class action settlements than the diversity of their work force.

roadhand · 2013-10-24T13:19:35+00:00

"We were at a meeting the other day, and there (were), I counted, 34 people in this big conference room, executives at companies ... There were four women," said Jennifer Keough, one of the eight female executives at the legal services firm Garden City Group.

The other 33 were attending to the work at hand.

bridgecrewdave · 2013-10-24T16:56:13+00:00

Someone needs to find that story and post it of the woman who started and all woman business and how absolutely awful it was for everyone And closed in like two years.

businesstimemod · 2013-10-24T09:43:03+00:00

[permanently deleted]

ralphswanson · 2013-10-24T17:15:44+00:00

The path to a more just society is to grant the wealthy, powerful, entitled Hillary Clintons even more power and money. After all, Steve Jobs, and all other men at the top, got where they were by pushing deserving women out of the way. Decades of affirmative action are not enough. Oh, and please don't notice the millions of men at the bottom of the social pyramid: the homeless, suicides, school drop-outs, prisoners, etc.

Feminism 101: Men's failure is proof that men are evil. Men's success is proof that men are evil.

2013-10-25T01:33:37+00:00

Women are always so quick to puke up that "Women earn less than Men" statement, but they always forget to mention how much less productive they are.

liquidxlax · 2013-10-24T06:00:07+00:00

I honestly think with more men, the more they "screw" around, but with women around they actually have to work harder because there is less buddy buddy shit. Its not that the women contributes more than a man.

I say this because for as long as i can remember, there has only ever been one woman at my work, but even with the addition of one more production has gone up and there is less slacking off because they cannot "talk" the same with the new girl around because there are problems apparently

Yet this is what i deal with

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