Who run the world? Not girls.

Yahoo! recently called for a drastic commitment from their employees. Their workers who work from home were asked to leave their home for work and come into a Yahoo! office to work instead. This decision was made under CEO Marissa Mayer. Mayer is under fire again because she has decided to build a nursery next to her office in order to watch her 4-month year old baby. Many are upset that Mayer is acting selfishly by building this nursery, when

many workers are being asked to leave their children at home. But instead of ranting about Mayer, why aren’t her accomplishments cited more readily? Mayer was appointed CEO at the age of 37 and at the time of her appointment was 5 months pregnant!

Let’s play a game – name three CEO’s of any companies. I’ll go first; the first three that came to mind were the late Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and Donald Trump.  I then racked my mind for women CEO’s because it fazed me that I wasn’t able to name any. Oprah, I finally came up with Oprah. When I researched female CEO’s, I found that 42 out of 1000 companies that were on the Fortune 1000 list were female, that’s .42%! These women are never in the news – I asked my roommates to name 3 CEO’s and they too named Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and (sadly) the guys on Duck Dynasty (yes, these are my roommates).

As I researched the topic further, there was very little definitive research about whether or not female CEO’s positively or negatively affected a company. Some research indicated that having a female or male CEO had little to no affect on the success of the company. On the other hand, another study showed that having more women in powerful positions in the company actually resulted in less of a decline in stock prices. Some European companies even showed stock prices rose for companies with the highest proportion of women in positions of power. What also stood out to me was that a study conducted in the US from the 2000 census stated that women made more money in industries where more women were in a position of power. Not only that, another study goes onto say, the interaction between female leadership and the women in their firm resulted in a positive impact on firm performance. Women empowering women, what a nice turn of events!

Although many of these studies have resulted in inconclusive evidence, and some have even argued that correlation does not equal causation. The link is well established, more women lends to more success. Perhaps it is because women bring diversity and insight onto a homogenous board, or maybe this diversity fuels better discussion amongst team members. Whatever the reason may be – we can’t deny that if a company does not represent a majority of their consumers and their market (aka women) then they aren’t doing their best to thrive.