Hi Jen, do you have a good article on how gender diverse boards are more successful (or their companies?) I’d love to share some empirical evidence about this with a client of my firm.  M.

Sure, M, as you might expect there are loads of articles around women and boards.  The three that I recommend most often are:

1. The Bottom Line: Connecting Corporate Performance and Gender Diversity was one of the first data analysis produced, back in 2007 by Catalyst, and analysed the performance of Fortune500 companies against their gender diversity.  This groundbreaking research found that the group of companies with the highest representation of women on their top management teams experienced better financial performance than the group of companies with the lowest women’s

representation: Return on Equity (ROE) was 35% higher, and Total Return to Shareholders (TRS) was 34%higher.

2. The Bottom Line: Corporate Performance and Women’s Representation on Boards (2004–2008) is another Catalyst report, published in March 2011, again looked at Fortune500 companies and found that companies with sustained high representation of women board directors (WBD), defined as those with three or more WBD in at least four of five years, significantly outperformed those with sustained low representation by 84 percent on Return On Sales, by 60 percent on Return On Invested Capital, and by 46 percent on Return On Equity.

3. For the Australian context, The Reibey Institute analyses the ASX500 companies – and in it’s 2011 report it found that ASX500 companies with women directors on their boards delivered Return on Equity (ROE) up to 8.7% higher than those companies without women directors.

Good luck with it, M, and I hope you can shed some light for your client on the upside potential of bringing gender balance to its business!