Women on Corporate Boards

Michael -- Thanks for sharing your colleague's comments on my post about the Wellesley study finding that the presence of three or more women on corporate boards enhances governance.  I haven't read more than the abstract of the study, either, and I agree that it doesn't sound like a particularly rigorous study.  I will freely admit that my deeply held belief that the presence of some critical mass of women in any group engaged in any sort of enterprise -- from organizing an academic conference to running a parish committee to conducting a book club to acting as an advisory panel for Thompson/West's Selected Commercial Statutes Supplement -- perceptibly changes the dynamic, the process, and the experience, is based on personal experience and anecdote.  Whether it has a measurable impact on the outcome or the success of the enterprise is a different question, and your colleague is probably right that this study doesn't prove that, one way or the other.  I can't help but think that it would, but I also think it would be impossible to test this proposition at this time, given the dearth of critical masses of women on corporate boards.

I can appreciate your colleague's frustration at the dearth of women with credentials usually associated with board members, such attaining positions as CEO's and CFO's of public companies.  Indeed, a couple of the articles posted under my name on the sidebar document the dearth of women in the upper echelons of the workplace generally, as well as in academia. 

Your colleague asks:  "Does a woman have a different take on issues of drug development than a man?  I can't see how - we do our research in limited areas - HIV and Hepatitis drugs, where gender doesn't seem to play a role."  Although I'm certainly not an expert on drug development, it seems to me that gender does play a significant role in choices about what sorts of drugs are developed and how they are marketed.  I'm not going to be able to point to specific cites, and I'm open to being proved to have been foolishly swayed by "urban myths" by MOJer's and readers who know more about this than I, but isn't there some controversy about basic drugs having different effects on women's body's than mens, and about the prevalence of female contraceptive drugs that are much more intrusive on women's body's than men's contraceptive drugs might need to be on theirs?  And isn't there significant concern about the spread of HIV among women in Africa and the marketing and sale of HIV drugs in Africa?  It seems to me there might be some significant gender issues involved in drug development.   Of course that doesn't establish that having a significant number of women on the board of a drug company might change the direction the company might take, or the eventual stock price of that company.

Finally, your colleague does suggest that "There may be companies where gender might matter.", speculating that "Consumer product companies where the market is largely composed of women is an obvious example.  There may be other companies faced with charges or complaints involving gender, such as discrimination, where women's insights could be valuable." 

I'd be curious to hear more about the particular difference in men's and women's perspectives that your colleague thinks might make a difference in those situations.  Are women swayed by different kinds of marketing or advertising than men?  Are women going to have different analysis of appropriate institutional reactions to certain charges and complaints than men, when faced with the same facts and the same legal schemes?  I think probably so, and I think that these insights and the different reactions flowing from those insights might be equally valuable in almost every corporation in almost every situation.  I'd be interested to hear more about why your colleague would limit the value of women's different insights to those two situations.

Lisa