Women Board Members Better At Ousting

Pulse

oi-Staff

By Staff

Tuesday, August 11, 2009, 16:21

A new study finds women board members to be more efficient for the organization as compared to their male counterparts.

In the research, two academics have apparently found that while female board members behave more like , this does not necessarily translates into bigger profits. Labour's deputy leader and Equality Minister Harriet Harman corroborates this. He has said that the credit crisis could have been prevented had more women been present on bank boards.

However, the research has received huge criticism from working directors and chairmen, who have said that it is impossible to stereotype male and female behavior in the boardroom or link it to performance.

The research also found that companies with more women on the board were more likely to be tough on chief executives, speedily removing those with poor stock price performance. "Women behave more like ," Times Online quotes Ferreira, as saying. He adds: "Having women on the board makes the board tougher on monitoring chief executives , but that doesn't necessarily translate into better profitability and stock market performance."

He concluded that female directors were good for the profitability of poorly governed companies but not for the majority that were well managed. "We have shown that women are tougher on chief executives after performance has fallen ," he said. "But it is difficult to say whether they would have prevented the fall. I am reluctant to say they could have prevented the banking crisis."

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