Companies perform better with women on the board

Study of UK, US and India finds companies suffer large opportunity cost of having male-only executive teams.

Companies perform better when they have at least one female executive on the board, a study of companies in the UK, US and India shows.

Companies with male-only executive directors missed out on £430bn of investment returns last year, the accountancy firm Grant Thornton found in its report, Women in business: the value of diversity.

Only one in 10 of the companies surveyed had female board executives. The UK’s share of the forfeited returns was £49bn or about 3% of GDP. In the US the amount was £373bn; in India it was £9bn.

The report sheds further light on the benefits of women in the boardroom as the governement prepare a push to get women into top managerial jobs. Previous studies have found that female directors provide a different perspective on subjects ranging from what customers want to risky corporate ventures.

In March, women held 23.5% of board positions at FTSE 100 companies, close to the target set by Lord Mervyn Davies in his 2011 review. Though all FTSE 100 firms have female directors, women only make up 8.6% of executive directorships, up from 5.5% four years ago. The figures show a lag in the number of women running companies rather than overseeing them as non-executives.

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