Reputation Gurus

In yesterday’s blog posting, I pondered a bit why companies with women at the top have delivered better financial results, according to the US organization Catalyst.  I don’t want to turn this blog into a treatise for the feminism movement, but, interestingly, the FT filed a story this morning that posed the same question.

According to the FT, McKinsey presented research yesterday at the Women’s Forum for the Economy & Society in Deauville, France, which finds that there’s a strong link between the number of women at the top and a company’s financial performance, showing that these companies do better in than the average company in their sector in terms of return on equity, operating result and share price growth.  The study took it further by finding that companies around the world where a third or more of the senior team are women score higher on organisational excellence — accountability, innovation and work environment.

The article does ask why this is true, but there are no real conclusions.  For us as reputation managers, I believe that we should be looking at these types of factors and how to play them up with key internal and external stakeholders.