I was curious about the claim that companies with women on the board are more likely to experience strong financial performance. Nobody has presented a clear explanation of how this mechanism would work: "women have unique insights" is about as precise as it gets, but I have yet to see a concrete example of that be presented myself.

So I followed the links and downloaded the research paper. I noticed a few things about it.

Firstly, it is research that comes from an investment advisory firm of some sort (MSCI ESG Research). It is not academic research, and the firm is not free of bias: they claim to be committed to diversity on their website. They clearly start with conclusions they'd like to reach. Did that affect their rigour?

The paper doesn't actually look at all companies with women on the board. It actually examines companies that the researchers classify as having "strong female leadership". Strong female leadership is defined as follows:

- 3 or more women on the board

- Or one woman on the board but a female CEO

- Or its percentage of women on the board is above the country average

- And has not "been implicated in discrimination allegations in the past three years, as captured by our proprietary controversies database".

The first three seem OK, although the phrasing is ambiguous - strong female leadership would usually be interpreted as meaning decisiveness by female leaders, not the mere presence of them.

The final item is problematic. If companies that have a lot of women on the board were in fact yielding worse financial performance due to being distracted with lots of bogus discrimination lawsuits then this study simply wouldn't show it at all, as it arbitrarily drops 53 data points from its sample.

The list of companies dropped and included is not available, so the study is not reproducible.

I wondered if they'd engaged in any other dubious data analysis practices. The most apparent one is that they're measuring financial performance but don't control for other variables that could affect it. The report notes that many countries included in their analysis have mandatory quotas for women in the boardroom. If those countries experienced slightly better stock market performance in general, for reasons unrelated to gender diversity, then that would yield a spurious result of "more women = better performance". In fact without controlling for this it would appear that what they're really doing is comparing economic performance of different countries, as those countries are all mandated to have "strong female leadership" by law.

In fairness, the paper does note that they find no causal link and can't explain their own results. Unfortunately, being advocacy and not academic research, most of the paper is devoted to promoting the cause of women on corporate boards anyway.

Overall the few minutes I spent on researching this does not further endear me to feminist views. The casual repetition of a dubious claim that's literally a case of "correlation is not causation", based on cherry picked data to boot, simply to attack men who sit on boards - this does not sit well.

edit: also note that the claim about bribery comes from the same source and paper