March 5, 2022
As companies pledge to hit new gender quotas on boards and in senior leadership, researchers hope their work can communicate some of the harder-to-quantify benefits of diversifying the C-suite.
The gist:
Researchers combed through 43,000 pages of corporate SEC filings—or 1.23 billion words—after a female CEO succeeded a male chief executive.
What did they find?
“Simply put, tapping women for leadership roles changes how an organization perceives women.”
The Stats:
- Companies that elevated women to the corner office were more likely to associate women with leadership traits that are typically tied to men (like decisiveness and assertiveness)
- The “change in organizational language trickles down to more junior levels. ‘As soon as you hire a female leader, and can break down stereotypes, the chances are that women you hire across all levels of an organization are going to be successful.’"
What is the key takeaway?
For co-author, Lawson, the takeaway is simple: "Hire women."
The research was conducted by:Asher Lawson, a PhD candidate at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business + Sandra Matz, the David W. Zalaznick associate professor of business at Columbia Business School and was recently published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
