With women on their boards, would financial organizations have better forseen, or even prevented the current crises?

How many crises do we need to move from wishful thinking to gender diversity reality?

Who do you feel is responsible for the current financial crisis? Do you think that having more women on the boards of financial institutions would have prevented it from going so far into the vicious circle of trying to cover mistakes by packaging them into a neat marketing stuff, again and again, until bursting point?

If you don’t understand how the crisis arose, visit Subprime for dummies to get the overview.

Out of the 123 people who responded to our October poll, 53 percent think that with women on their boards, financial organisations would have better foreseen or even prevented the crisis. Twenty-four percent don’t know, and only 20 percent think that it would not have changed the situation.

This same question was asked recently at several women’s events, and the majority responded agreed that having more women in executive and board roles can contribute to safer management and a healthier future. Although, we need to ask if it is women’s different leadership style that would have led to better management, or even exposed the state of affairs, or is it that having women on boards is just a sign that everything generally will be better handled in a company; more transparent, more collaborative, more sustainable?

Catalyst made it clear a while ago that having more women on boards leads to better results with several studies, the last one having been published just a year ago. Read about it
here

But until crisis happens, things hardly move. Then, when a crisis occurs, many people start to think, as Hudson reports in their study Could the right man for the job be a woman? or even more appealing, as 17 UK FTSE 100 CEOs declare in a letter entitled ‘More than ever, we need women on boards’, which they sent to the Daily Telegraph on 20 October.

“How many crises will we need to move from wishful thinking to reality?”

Cecile Demailly
EuropeanPWN
November 2008

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