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In this month’s edition of Financial Post Magazine, editor Andy Holloway asks the headline question: “Will adding more female directors improve a company’s results?” The answer: “Maybe not, but the pressure to do so is not going away.” The magazine’s quick analysis of the market performance of the TSX 60 shows little or no relationship with board gender diversity. Among companies in the consumer category, Saputo Inc. (with five out of 10 female directors) had a five-year market gain of 49.8 per cent, while Alimentation Couche-Tard (with three out of 11 female directors) achieved a gain of 163 per cent and Dollarama (with 2 out of 11 female directors) gained 173 per cent.

What does all this mean? Absolutely nothing, one way or another, and not just because the FP Magazine’s rough numbers were produced without the sophisticated input of a giant consulting firm or Credit Suisse Research Institute, cited by Mark Machin as an authority for the CPPIB’s plan to base investment decisions on board diversity.

Credit Suisse’s latest 2016 report on corporate gender performance is filled with categorical claims. “We find clear evidence” of greater performance among firms with women in decision-making roles. Even companies with only one female director “generated a compound excess return per annum of 3.3 per cent for investors over the previous last decade.” Imagine! Just one woman and returns jump.

Katherine Klein of the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, a leading supporter of the role of women within corporations, is also a skeptic on the links between corporate performance and women on boards. She says “research conducted by consulting firms and financial institutions is not as rigorous as peer-reviewed academic research.” The link between board diversity and performance is “very weak,” she says. When academics dug into a couple of studies they found that “the relationship between board gender diversity and company performance is either non-exist (effectively zero) or very weakly positive.”