A piece in the latest edition of the Mail on Sunday. We salute the company’s board members.

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Enjoy (9:18).

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Our thanks to Ian for this. An extract:

The Investment Association has 250 members which manage £7.7tn in assets. Its boss Chris Cummings said that it is “unacceptable” that one in five of the UK’s biggest companies are falling short on gender diversity.

“Companies must do more than take the tokenistic step of appointing just one woman to their board and consider that job done.

“There is also compelling evidence that boards with greater gender balance outperform their less diverse peers,” he said.

In the final sentence Cummings is, of course, confusing correlation with causation – whether knowingly or unknowingly. Better-performing firms can more easily afford to engage in social engineering exercises such as increasing the proportion of women on their boards. As every follower of this blog knows, the “compelling evidence” is of a causal link between increasing gender diversity on boards, and financial performance decline. The evidence is here. Nobody has challenged the evidence since we published it in 2012, and presented it to House of Commons and House of Lords inquiries the same year.

If everyone who read this gave us £5.00 – or even better, £5.00 or more, monthly – we could change the world. £5.00 monthly would entitle you to Bronze party membership, details here. Benefits include a dedicated and signed book by Mike Buchanan. Click below to make a difference. Thanks.

Our thanks to Ian for this. An extract:

The Investment Association has 250 members which manage £7.7tn in assets. Its boss Chris Cummings said that it is “unacceptable” that one in five of the UK’s biggest companies are falling short on gender diversity.

“Companies must do more than take the tokenistic step of appointing just one woman to their board and consider that job done.

“There is also compelling evidence that boards with greater gender balance outperform their less diverse peers,” he said.

In the final sentence Cummings is, of course, confusing correlation with causation – whether knowingly or unknowingly. Better-performing firms can more easily afford to engage in social engineering exercises such as increasing the proportion of women on their boards. As every follower of this blog  knows, the only “compelling evidence” of a causal link is that between increasing gender diversity on boards, and financial performance decline. The evidence is here. Nobody has challenged the evidence since we published it in 2012, and presented it to House of Commons and House of Lords inquiries the same year.

If everyone who read this gave us £5.00 – or even better, £5.00 or more, monthly – we could change the world. £5.00 monthly would entitle you to Bronze party membership, details here. Benefits include a dedicated and signed book by Mike Buchanan. Click below to make a difference. Thanks.

Our thanks to James and Ray for this. Extracts:

Sacha Romanovitch, the first UK female chief executive of a major City accountancy firm, will step down from Grant Thornton by the end of this year…

Romanovitch said: “As we enter the next phase of our plans, following discussions with Grant Thornton’s board, we have agreed that the time is right for a new chief executive to take the firm forward. I will be working to support a smooth transition to our next chief executive, focusing on continuing to deliver sustainable value for our clients through our diverse [J4MB emphasis] and talented team.”…

Last month, an unnamed Grant Thornton insider claiming to speak for 15 partners or directors [£] [J4MB: Another odd Grauniad typo] leaked to several news organisations the contents of Romanovitch’s annual performance review and an unsigned complaint saying she had “misdirected” the firm.

The anonymous writer accused Romanovitch of pursuing a “socialist agenda” [J4MB: More accurately, a feminist agenda, presumably, of advancing women over men, regardless of their relative merit] and that the firm had no focus on profitability under her leadership and was “out of control”….

The firm’s web page on Romanovitch is here. An extract:

My real passion is enabling others to meet their potential, which has led me to become a qualified coach; to champion our firm’s ground-breaking apprentice programme; and to challenge the norm on views regarding diversity [J4MB emphasis] – a role I am so passionate about I am the chair of the Patron Group for Access Accountancy.

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We’re delighted to report that Dr Catherine Hakim, a world-renowned British sociologist, will be attending the conference.

She’s best known to followers of this website as the originator of Preference Theory in 2000, when she was a Senior Research Fellow at the LSE. For us, the key statistics she reported in her paper were that four in seven British men are “work-centred”, while just one in seven British women is.

All else being equal, we’d expect the gender balance on (say) FTSE100 boards to be around 80% male, 20% female. But all else is far from equal. Two thirds of private sector employees are men, and men still occupy most of the senior positions in professions which disproportionately lead to board directorships, notably Finance. Adding in these factors, we’d expect women to take up fewer than 5% of FTSE100 directorships. Due to government threats of legislated gender quotas, women now occupy over 25% of those positions, and the figure continues to rise. Tellingly, more than 90% of female FTSE100 board directors are Non-Executive Directors.

In late 2012 my request to give oral evidence on behalf of Campaign for Merit in Business to the House of Commons inquiry “Women in the Workplace” was accepted, and at my request I was accompanied by Dr Catherine Hakim and Steve Moxon. The video (56:49) is here.

The committee utterly refused to engage with the evidence I presented of a causal link between increasing female representation on boards and corporate financial decline. Three months later we launched J4MB.

I was recently interviewed by Karren Brady for her hour-long Channel 5 TV documentary, “Why do men earn more than women?” It was broadcast last night, and judging by the adverts before and during the programme, the target audience was predominantly women.

Karen and I had a filmed discussion of about two hours. Very little of the explanations I presented her with concerning gender pay gaps made it into the final documentary – not William Collins’s analysis, not Dr Catherine Hakim’s Preference Theory, published in 2000 – four out of seven British men are work-centred, but only one out of seven British women is. I presented the evidence of a causal link between increasing gender diversity on corporate boards, and financial decline, she ignored it and instead alluded to a 2016 Credit Suisse report which she believed showed a causal link with improved profitability, but didn’t.

The documentary is here, our discussion is between 26:57 – 30:33.

Followers of this website will need no reminding that we’ve been explaining since 2012 that strong evidence exists – here – demonstrating a causal link between increasing gender diversity on boards, and corporate financial DECLINE. While proponents of ‘more women on boards’ continue to misrepresent correlation (between increasing gender diversity on boards, and corporate financial improvement) as causation, any 16-year-old studying Mathematics at GCSE level should be aware that correlation isn’t the same as causation, and doesn’t even imply it.

Professor Susan Vinnicombe of Cranfield University has been for many years the world’s leading academic proponent for ‘more women on boards’. In 2012 she admitted to a House of Lords inquiry that she knew of no evidence of a causal link between increasing gender diversity on boards, and improved corporate financial performance – here.

Our thanks to James for alerting us to an article about a Chinese investor based in Beijing, Luo Mingxiong. The start of the piece:

After days in the spotlight for saying female CEOs are bad for business, Luo Mingxiong, a Chinese investor in Beijing, does not regret what he said.

“If I could have had a chance to say it again, I would still list this as my investment principle,” said Luo. He was referring to his statement at a public presentation in Beijing this month that “we usually don’t invest in female chief executive officers”.

Luo, the founder of Beijing venture capital firm Jingbei Investment, sparked a public outcry in China as he listed female CEOs in his 10 no-investment principles, suggesting that in the corporate world, they are as negative an attribute as dishonesty or an inability to learn.

Embedded in the article is a link to an article by a female journalist, Enoch Yiu, and published in 2016 in the South China Morning Post. It’s titled, Female CEOs, board members improve company returns, says Credit Suisse study. She is misrepresenting correlation as causation. The 52-page-long 2016 Credit Suisse study is here. The bottom line? At no point does the report claim a causal link between increased gender diversity on boards, and improved corporate financial performance.

Another excellent piece from the august August. Our thanks to AVfM for the image above, taken from the piece. An excerpt:

15 of the 20 men still held their titles after 5 years, compared to just 10 of the 20 women.

8 of the men improved the ranking of their companies, compared to 0 of the women.

Final result: Men at plus 451 were 994 ranks higher than comparable women CEOs, who scored minus 443. This was not just a slaughter of women CEOs, this was Bambi meets Godzilla.

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A tip of the hat to August Lovenskiolds for his illuminating analysis. The bottom line:

In 2012, 20 S&P 500 companies had female CEOs.

By 2017, 10 of the women were no longer CEOs.

By 2017, all the female CEO’s companies had fallen in the S&P rankings.

If everyone who read this gave us just £1 – or even better, £1 monthly – we could change the world. Click here to make a difference. Thanks.