A Better World, Run by Women

[Orrex]

84. Different conclusions are possible.

Of the companies out-performing the stock market, what was the state of their fiscal health prior to the woman's tenure as CEO? Was it tanking? Holding steady? On the upswing?

Did other personnel changes occur at high levels that contributed to their solid performance? Did a new CFO come on board during that time and make a big, positive splash?

Did longterm projects/plans/deals/mergers come to fruition during the woman's tenure as CEO?

Did the company outperform the stock market due to insightful top-down management or, for example, by firing 10,000 employees?

What was the overall state of the respective industries? How did similar companies in the industry (rather than industries in the stock market as a whole) perform during the same period?

None of these questions assumes that women aren't responsible for the improved performance, of course--they simply point out that the CEO isn't the only reason for every good quarter, whether the CEO is a woman or a man. In other words, the issue is more complex then checking off a list of strong-performing companies and seeing which ones are helmed by women, and I'm not sure that the HuffPo article addresses this adequately.

Further, the comparison between governments and corporations doesn't assume that corporations can declare war, either. Thatcher is invariably described as having been "masculinized," and therefore her aggressive, warlike nature isn't representative of women in government. That's frankly misogynistic, because it means that she succeeded because she acted like a man and therefore doesn't "count" as a woman.

Why, then, should we conclude that a powerful women in the corporate world succeeds because she acted unlike a man? That's self-serving, circular reasoning.

The bottom line is that I'm not convinced women have some inherent quality that makes them better CEOs, nor am I convinced that the provided evidence supports that conclusion. If nothing else, we must bear in mind that women are still grossly under-represented at the top levels of the corporate world. It's therefore possible that we're seeing a non-representative sample of the group of all potential women CEOs, studying only those top performers who've had the drive, opportunity, and good fortune to overcome the barriers keeping women generally out of those positions. How does the HuffPo article account for this possibility?