Another day, another article about the supposed benefits of increasing gender diversity on corporate boards, this time by Joanne Cleaver in Investment News. The inference that correlation is evidence of causation couldn’t be clearer:

Tallying the proportion of women on boards of publicly held companies is straightforward, thanks to reports mandated by the Securities and Exchange Commission. Women’s advocacy organizations like Catalyst have mined such data for decades. As evidence accumulates that a significant proportion of women on boards of companies correlates with stronger and more sustainable financial performance, investors say they must have more detailed information about women in the executive ranks and leadership pipeline, the better to put money in the hands of women who could deliver superior results.

In December we posted public challenges of four leading proponents of ‘more women on boards’. They didn’t respond to the challenge, predictably, and I’m now going to email Joanne Cleaver (jcleaver@investmentnews.com) with the same challenge. I confidently predict that she, too, won’t respond to it.