Are you sitting down right now? Maybe sit down. Is there something on your desk you can squeeze to release the wave of total anger and frustration that's about to hit you? Yeah, grab that. Because, well, this: Bloomberg BusinessWeek reports that at a tech start-up conference in Sydney, Evan Thornley, the cofounder of an online advertising company in Australia, gave a presentation about the benefits of hiring women, saying women are "often relatively cheap compared to what we would've had to pay someone less good of a different gender." He then reportedly pulled up a slide that read, "Women: Like men, only cheaper."

If comments like Thornley's make you feel like this, you're not alone.

Thornley's talk didn't start off so badly: He mentioned how his company, LookSmart, has had women in senior management since the start-up went public in 1999 and the gender gap in tech was the size of the Grand Canyon. But then Thornley, who served two years in Parliament and allegedly has an estimated net worth of roughly $54 million, took a turn. A stupid, insulting one. "Call me opportunistic; I thought I could get better people with less competition because we were willing to understand the skills and capabilities that many of these woman had," Thornley said, according to BusinessWeek. Hmmm. Opportunistic isn't quite the word I would use. Tone deaf, maybe. Sexist, perhaps. Because essentially what Thornley's point boils down to is this: Companies should hire highly qualified women and then pay them less than they would pay men with the same or lesser abilities. His attitude—and shocking unawareness—is part of the reason women still earn less than men.

Let's just say the obvious: Businesses shouldn't hire women because they think they can pay them less or they are being so-called charitable. They should hire women because it's simply smart business (and not for the reason Mr. Thornley states.) In a Fast Company article titled "Here Are All the Quantifiable Reasons You Should Hire More Women," Ariel Schwartz outlines research that proves that hiring women isn't just a nice thing to do. For starters, Fortune 500 companies with three or more female directors "have seen their return on invested capital increase by at least 66 percent, return on sales increase by 42 percent, and return on equity increase by at least 53 percent," writes Schwartz. A study of 1,500 U.S. firms showed that having women in top management roles improves financial performance "for organizations where innovation is a key piece of the business strategy." A Carnegie Mellon study found that teams with "at least one female member" had a "higher collective IQ than all-male teams." A Gallup study revealed that companies with diverse teams that include women have a lower turnover rate.

And there's more where that came from: In a report titled "Why Diversity Matters," Catalyst, an organization promoting gender equality at work, summarizes the findings Schwartz references—as well as further research showing that women reduce conflict, increase development, and improve a company's corporate reputation. In that same vein, an additional study of over 7,000 leaders showed that "women outperformed men on 12 of 16 measures of outstanding leadership competencies and scored the same as men in the other four," and research also shows that a company's stock price spikes "significantly" after the announcement of a woman appointed to a top leadership position.