Gender-Diverse Boards Perform Better - A Lot Better

If your organization has an all-male board, chances are you’re leaving a ton of money on the table. A study of publicly traded companies in the US, UK, and India found that companies with at least one woman on the board outperform companies with all-male boards in every region.

Researchers estimate that collectively, those companies with all-male boards gave up $655 billion last year alone. That’s how much more they would be making if they performed at the level of their peers who were able to find one or more women to fill a board seat. The gaps in the US and the UK translate to about 3 percent of GDP for each country.

All but 16 of the S&P 500 companies currently have at least one woman on the board, but men still hold over 80 percent of total board seats in the S&P 500.

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About the Author

Julianne Helinek is Take The Lead's blog editor and writer of the newsletter Take The Lead This Week. She thinks the women she knows are too talented not to be running the world, and she’s especially interested in bringing more men into the gender equality conversation. Julianne is an MBA student at NYU’s Stern School of Business. For more on feminism in the business school world, follow her on Twitter at @thefeministmba.