[This challenge was first made by Mike Buchanan on another website, which is no longer operational, on 1 December 2012.]
Regular visitors to this site will need no reminding about the central role in the ‘improving’ gender diversity in the boardroom (‘GDITB’) initiative played by Sir Roger Carr, chairman of Centrica, and currently [Note: at the time this challenge was first made] president of the CBI. He doesn’t personally claim that GDITB leads to improved corporate financial performance, but maintains that GDITB leads to improved ‘meeting atmospherics’. Which must be nice for him. We wonder what Centrica’s shareholders think of his social engineering exercise.
Given Sir Roger’s predictable presence at yesterday’s celebrations for the second anniversary of the founding of the 30% club, we thought it was about time we issued him with a public challenge:
Numerous longitudinal studies have shown that ‘improving’ gender diversity on corporate boards leads to DECLINES in corporate financial performance, while no longitudinal studies (to the best of our knowledge) have shown it leads to an improvement:
Do you challenge the rigour or findings of these studies? And if not, do you believe that a decline in corporate financial performance is a price worth paying for ‘improving’ gender diversity in boardrooms? If you do believe this, it would be a position with some integrity:
http://c4mb.wordpress.com/2012/11/11/arguments-for-improving-gender-diversity-in-the-boardroom/
We look forward to learning of your position on this matter. Thank you.
