Female directors improve business performance - has implications for Christian ecclesiology

The Rev Elizabeth Kaeton recently commented that she believes the Episcopal Church's House of Bishops would have issued a vastly different statement in response to the Primates if women were proportionately represented among bishops (they still are not, even though our Presiding Bishop is a woman). Her post is easy to misinterpret as condoning some sort of ontological difference between men and women, but I believe her point is this. Women are less repulsed by those who are not straight. Specifically, they're less repulsed by the thought of two men having (gasp!!!) anal sex. There is evidence to suggest that women in general have less negative attitudes towards homosexuality, so I believe she is correct here. She also asserts that the issues of power and control would be framed in a less hostile fashion if the House of Bishops were half or more women. Here, I do not agree with her, but perhaps I am misinterpreting her statement. I hope she will correct me if I'm wrong.

Nonetheless, the HoB is still primarily male and White. There are a growing number of studies that provide a case for diversity in business. I believe the church should take note. We should resolve to make our leadership bodies representative of the diversity inherent in the human race. That means that down the road, half of our bishops need to be women. 5-10% need to be gay. About 35% (I think) need to be people of color. And so on. MSN Money has an article on women in business leadership positions, which I've posted below.


Having women well represented in the corporate boardroom can help improve financial performance, according to a new study by a group that promotes women in executive roles.

Catalyst, a nonprofit organization focused on women in the workplace, released a report today showing that big companies with the greatest number of female board members on average have significantly better financial performance than those with fewer women.

he report looked at financial results, such as return on equity, at the 500 largest U.S. corporations. Those with at least three female directors had notably stronger financial performance, on average, the study found.

The results suggest that "diversity, well managed, produces better results" for companies, said Catalyst President Ilene Lang.

"Bringing women on their boards to represent the stakeholders really gives them a better company and better performance," Lang said. The correlation was found throughout an array of industries, she said.

The study looked at three financial measures -- return on equity, return on sales and return on invested capital -- at companies in the Fortune 500 over the 2001-to-2004 period.

Those years were chosen because they were part of a financial recovery period after significant stock-market turmoil.

In return on equity, on average, companies with the highest percentages of female board members outperformed those with the least by 53%, the study found.

In return on sales, the companies with more female board directors outperformed by 42% on average and in return on invested capital, by 66%, Catalyst said. [Editor: return on invested capital is a key measure of a company's profitability, and is indeed harder to manipulate.]

The group said it chose these three benchmarks, rather than things such as earnings or stock-price movement, to try to best track how a company performed financially.

Different voices around the table
Because of movement in and out of the Fortune 500, there were 520 companies in the analysis. Several academic experts worked with Catalyst researchers to compile the report.

Females are still a small minority in the boardroom, holding 14.6% of Fortune 500 board seats in 2006, down slightly from 14.7% in 2005, according to earlier research from Catalyst.

If the pace continues, it would take about 73 years for females to be equally represented on boards, the group projects.

Myrtle Potter, a director at Amazon.com (AMZN, news, msgs) and FoxHollow Technologies (FOXH, news, msgs) who was not involved in the preparation of the new study but reviewed the results, said the data showed women board members can have a major impact.

"I have believed all along that having different voices around the table makes a difference," she said. "It just goes to show that there is still a need for greater diversity on boards at publicly traded companies."

This article was reported and written by Martha Graybow for Reuters.