Wall Street Journal, October 4, 2012
Venture-backed companies that include females as senior executives are more likely to succeed than companies where only males are in charge, according to new research from Dow Jones.
The report, “Women at the Wheel,” does not speculate on why female executives improve a company’s chance of success, nor did it study companies where only females are involved.
But it finds that companies have a greater chance of either going public, operating profitably or being sold for more money than they’ve raised when they have females acting as founders, board members, C-level officers, vice presidents and/or directors. At successful companies, the median proportion of female executives was 7.1%; at unsuccessful companies, 3.1%.
The report followed 20,194 U.S.-based companies in the Dow Jones VentureSource database that either received funding or exited between 1997 and 2011. Of the 167,556 executives involved, about 7% were female.
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