Board gender diversity and business performance: Understanding and completing the narrative

Singapore

THE gender diversity deficit in business leadership has been lamented as a critical concern all across the world. But the exhortation must be more substantiated.

It has to go beyond having women for the sake of having women. It has to go to the root of the matter in why having such diversity matters for business.

We need a new storyline to convince businesses that it is in their very interests to embrace gender diversity in leadership.

Indeed, the missing narrative is the potential performance impact of gender diversity. And more than anything else, if this comes out, it has to be evidence-based.

Performance Conundrum

The statistical evidence for performance has been somewhat discouraging. The vast majority of studies found that the relation between board gender diversity and company performance is either non-existent or very weakly positive. This conclusion was based on aggregative analyses that had considered more …