4/04/2012

What Happens When Women Are Running Banks

It is not always a plus to have a woman for a boss -- especially if you’re a woman. Some men would say the same about their male boss. I admit that my first sentence wasn’t very nice. I’m entirely in favor of more female bosses, and even a quota system to ensure that. I raise the issue only after a new study about whether women make better leaders than men.

The study, of course, was written by men: Allen N. Berger of the University of South Carolina, Klaus Schaeck of Bangor University, and Thomas Kick, a research associate at the Deutsche Bundesbank– the institution under whose name the study was published, though the German central bank stresses that any opinions expressed are those of the authors, not the bank.

As is often the case with researchers, the way the men phrased the question on which they base their results is not easy to grasp. Obviously they asked nothing as simple as: “Do women make better bosses?” Instead they wondered: “How do the age, gender, and education of board members impact the volatility of a bank’s profits?”

They then gathered the results into a discussion paper entitled “Executive board composition and bank risk taking.” It is more than 60 pages long, and contains dozens of graphs and footnotes. The bottom line can, however, be summed up in a single sentence: “No, women do not make better bosses.”

The researchers focused particularly on whether women in the boardroom lead to banks’ investment decisions being more “feminine,” which is to say more risk-averse. They studied the track records of German banks between 1994 and 2010, using profit fluctuations as their parameter.

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