Happy Thursday!
There was a great article in the NY Times detailing a study of over 2200 companies in 90 countries. Of those firms, almost 60% had no female board members, more than 50% had no female executives and just fewer than 3% had a female CEO (it is 2016, right?). The study found that female CEOs did not either outperform or underperform, and it found some indications that having women on boards was correlated with higher profitability. The study found overwhelming evidence  that having women in management had a direct improvement in overall firm profitability. Increasing the number of women in management from 0% to 30% was associated with a 15% increase in profitability – now what rational person would not want that? The full article can be found here: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/10/business/women-in-company-leadership-tied-to-stronger-profits.html
ACIO magazine interviewed Gina Miller, founder of SCM Direct, who called out our industry brethren for paying lip service to diversity without really doing anything about it. To quote her “Inequality is a real issue and is hindering competitiveness. The evidence is clear: Diverse teams make better decisions and deliver better results. Clearer employee data, improved recruitment processes, and a reinvigorated focus on business culture will all pay dividends—whatever the size of your company.” The full article can be found here: http://www.ai-cio.com/channel/NEWSMAKERS/Diversity%E2%80%94Let-s-Get-Real/
For the entrepreneurs out there, an article in the Huffington Post highlighted exactly why women don’t get funding from VCs complete with a text exchange that illustrates that even today (still 2016, right?), the majority of men in power think of women as either wives or mothers as opposed to competent human beings.  A quote from the article sums it up: “When you ask me about having it all, or how am I going to manage my kids, I seriously think that you are insane,” writes Nadav, who is about to launch a new financial startup. “Because in my head, I can’t imagine a scenario where you trust someone with millions of dollars to run a business but think that they don’t know how to deal with childcare.” The full article can be found here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/why-venture-capitalists-dont-fund-womens-businesses_us_56c2265de4b08ffac1260793
As a follow-on to the article demonstrating that when female economists collaborate on a group project, their contributions are overlooked, the Harvard Business Review did its own study and found that women definitely experience a ‘collaboration penalty’ when working in groups. Read on:https://hbr.org/2016/02/proof-that-women-get-less-credit-for-teamwork
For those of you in the job market, there is a new website that allows female employees to leave anonymous reviews for other women about how female friendly a company really is. The full article can be found here: http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/02/women-benefits-fairygodboss/460275/
And as if being overlooked and underappreciated was not enough, an article from Bloomberg, your gender can have a negative impact on your credit score. In spite of the women have lower overall debt and credit card balances, men edge out women when it comes to that all important rating:http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-02-10/does-your-gender-affect-your-credit-score
We have just an outstanding line up of events coming for you in 2016. We thank you all for your continued support as we continue to grow and look forward to seeing you all soon!
Very kind regards
 
Christine