经济学人 | 越来越多的女性正在进入公司董事会

More women are getting onto corporate boards. Good

越来越多的女性进入公司董事会，这是个好消息

Our annual measure of the role and influence of women in the workforce

我们每年都会对女性在职场中的作用和影响力进行评估

Women make up half of humankind, and it is reasonable for representative institutions such as corporate boards to reflect this. In 2022 the European Parliament ruled that at least 40% of non-executive directors at firms with more than 250 employees should be women by 2026. Britain’s FTSE 350 companies hit that mark last year, on average.

女性占人类总人口的一半，公司董事会等代表机构理应体现这一点。2022年，欧洲议会规定，到2026年，在拥有超过250名员工的公司中，非执行董事的女性比例应至少达到40%。英国富时350指数公司去年平均达到了这一标准。

Japan, where only 18% of directors are women, recently told big businesses to get to 30% by 2030. America’s constitutional dislike of quotas dooms similar efforts. But its markets regulator wants firms to disclose diversity statistics, which may shame some into action.

在日本，女性董事仅占18%，该国最近要求大型企业到2030年达到30%的比例。美国宪法不允许配额制，这使得类似的努力落空。但美国市场监管机构希望企业公布多元化统计数据，这可能会促使一些企业采取行动。

Our annual “glass-ceiling index”, which ranks OECD members on ten indicators of female workplace empowerment, shows all this is having an effect. Across the club of mostly rich countries, women’s share of directorships reached 33% in 2023, an all-time high. In France, New Zealand and Norway it is nudging 50%.

我们的年度“玻璃天花板指数”对经合组织成员国的女性职场赋权十大指标进行排名，结果显示所有这些措施正在产生效果。在主要由富裕国家组成的经合组织俱乐部中，女性在董事会中的占比在2023年达到33%，创下了历史新高。在法国、新西兰和挪威，这一比例已接近50%。

Is there a business case for more female boards, as well as a moral one? In 2020 consultants at McKinsey found that firms in the top quartile for board gender diversity were 25% likelier to outperform their industry average than those in the bottom quartile. Studies have found that appointment of a woman as boss can boost a firm’s share price and price-to-earnings ratio (though not its return on assets).

除了道德层面的理由，是否还有商业层面的理由支持更多女性进入董事会？2020年，麦肯锡公司的顾问们发现，董事会性别多样性排在前四分之一的公司，业绩超过行业平均水平的可能性比性别多样性排在后四分之一的公司高出25%。研究表明，任命女性担任首席执行官可以提振公司的股价和市盈率（尽管不是资产回报率）。

Yet so many factors influence a firm’s profitability that proving a causal link between representation and performance is next to impossible; companies that perform well for other reasons may have the luxury to also pay attention to things like diversity, for example.

然而，影响公司盈利能力的因素有很多，因此几乎不可能证明代表权与业绩之间的因果关系；例如，由于其他原因而表现良好的公司可能更有余力关注多元化等问题。

So instead, Margarethe Wiersema of the University of California, Irvine, and Marie Louise Mors of Copenhagen Business School interviewed directors at 200 big companies in Europe and America.

因此，加州大学欧文分校的玛格丽特·维尔瑟玛和哥本哈根商学院的玛丽·路易斯·莫尔斯采访了欧美200家大型公司的董事。

They found that women are consistently better prepared for board meetings, had better attendance rates and were more willing to ask probing questions. Female directors in other words, are “setting a higher standard and mitigating the problem of groupthink”. That should be a boon for corporate governance.

他们发现，女性董事为董事会会议所做的准备更为充分，出勤率更高，也更愿意提出具有探究性的问题。换句话说，女性董事“设定了更高的标准，并缓解了群体思维的问题”。这对公司治理来说应该是个好消息。