Women on Corporate Boards: A Matter of Equity, not "Difference"

I find myself increasingly frustrated by the conversation about the Wellesley "study" regarding women on corporate boards. That "study" was worse than useless; it's silliness makes it difficult to take as seriously as we should the question of whether the presence of women on boards would make a difference to corporate governance. Why is the study silly? Let me count the ways: the sample size is absurdly small; it is a survey of opinion, rather than anything measurable; the survey has no clear idea of how a critical mass of women would make a difference; it also has no clear idea of what the difference between good governance and bad governance might be; so the opinions it elicits are incommensurable with each other let alone anything coherent or tangible. The fatuousness of the study makes it look like special interest pleading supported by pseudo-scientific data. This is unfortunate, because feminist legal scholars have raised interesting questions about whether corporate law, and our models of corporate governance, are gender determined in some pernicious ways. I will add, however, that some distinguished female corporate law scholars find this whole line of inquiry fruitless. I will leave that debate to others. It strikes me as more important to figure out how we can get more women into the boardroom as a matter of equity, not because we should assume that corporations will be run differently, let alone "better" if more of them were there. In any event, I actually have spent a lot of time as a member of corporate boards and the boards of SROs (such as the New York Stock Exchange and the NASD) in the financial/securities world. I have served with many female co-directors. One cannot generalize from personal experience, but I can testify that my experience with highly professional, accomplished and hard nosed female directors from that world is that they were absolutely no different in any respect from their male colleagues ijn the way they approached their responsibilities and in the types pf decisions they made and the issues they considered important. They weren't "men in dresses"; they were people who adhered to the same professional/business/fiduciary ethos as the men. I was also delighted to see in the recent Hewlett Packard imbroglios with first Carly Fiorina and then Patricia Dunn that they are also equally prone to the same temptations of power as us guys. I think it is very dangerous to fall into a kind of essentialism about what women are like -- and I know some feminists would agree with that -- and to assume that a "critical mass" of women would produce a particular type of "better" corporate governance. As I stated above, it is silly to even begin this discussion without a very clear idea of what "better" governance is, or to continue it without a plausible explanation of how women would be more likely to produce it than men.

-Mark