A Better Bottom Line: More Women Leaders Yield Bigger Profits

More women leaders lead to more profits. While this is good news for every woman of any age aspiring to be a leader, the downside is 60 percent of the companies studied in 2014 had no female board members. And half of the companies in 91 countries had no female executives. Only 5 percent of those companies have a female CEO.

According to the study making headlines across the globe, “The largest gains are for the proportion of female executives, followed by the proportion of female board members… This pattern underscores the importance of creating a pipeline of female managers and not simply getting lone women to the top.”

And when corporations push to have female inclusion at the top, if they move from 0 women to 30 percent women leaders, the companies see a profitability increase of 15 percent. And who can turn down those numbers? The answer is to have more women in leadership roles to see the profits rise.

The Peterson Institute for International Economics and EY study of nearly 22,000 companies also tsk-tsked the myth that women lose ambition and drop out when they have children. “The evidence that having children leads women to opt out of the labor force is weak,” according to the study.

This is not news to Sallie Krawcheck, chair of Ellevate and ceo of Ellevest, who told a crowd at the Adobe sales conference recently that “investing in women is smart business” for many reasons, including that diverse teams outperform other teams. Her advice to women at the top and those looking to get there is to invest in networking, invest in time for others, invest in companies that treat women well and to stand up and cry foul when someone makes a sexist remark.

Some good news for women in the workplace is lately coming out of Switzerland, the land where watches and chocolate rule. Apparently so will pay equity. Swiss bank UBS announced it will close the pay gap between males and female employees and address gender-based discrepancies. They are also looking to hire more women.

About the Author

Michele Weldon is editorial director of Take The Lead, an award-winning author, journalist, emerita faculty in journalism at Northwestern University and a senior leader with The OpEd Project. @micheleweldon www.micheleweldon.com