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The numbers are certainly striking, but their meaning isn't but totally understood. Correlation doesn't equal causation: Whilst the link between greater levels of female leadership and profits is fairly well-established, it's less clear that women are straight accountable for the success. Rather, businesses of a specific kind - forward-thinking, adaptable - might each turn higher earnings and promote more women. And some of the data on women's influence are mixed. 1 current study, for instance, found that the presence of senior women just below the CEO led to greater earnings - but the impact of female CEOs was neutral or slightly unfavorable.

And if the high-level women do directly trigger better efficiency, it isn't entirely clear why. One possibility is the fact that women enjoy an edge in understanding the consumer market: by some estimates they make 80 percent of consumer purchases. Another theory is that gender diversity stimulates more vigorous discussions, resulting in smarter decisions. More controversially, women might on average exhibit a different, and fruitful, leadership style.

Some analysts even recommend that ladies might have been able to temper the excesses that led to the present monetary crisis. The culprits, one can't help but notice, were overwhelmingly male. More ladies in the table, some speculate, may have served as a prudent counterweight to reckless, testosterone-addled men. In fact, Iceland has dispatched a team composed largely of ladies to clean up following its collapse.

Going back at least to Betty Friedan's 1963 book "The Feminine Mystique," feminists have pushed for women to enter the workforce, to find a source of meaning, income, and independence outside the house. The dissatisfied housewives of Friedan's book are much less common now, and women have poured into all sectors from the economic climate, moving far beyond the secretary's office. Yet they nonetheless encounter the infamous "glass ceilings" and "sticky floors." The factors are numerous and mutually reinforcing: tenacious associations between leadership and masculinity; women's own priorities and obligations as mothers, which depend in turn on their spouses' parental contributions; and a selection of subtle cultural barriers.

As women have slowly penetrated the upper echelons, although, scholars have started to study the impact of their presence. In 2001, the late Roy Adler, a professor at Pepperdine University, found that companies that promoted much more ladies also did better financially. He and his colleagues examined data provided by much more than 200 Fortune 500 businesses concerning the gender makeup of their senior management and board members from 1980 to 1998. They discovered that the 25 best firms for women outperformed the business medians on three measures. Calculated as a percent of income, their profits had been 34 percent higher; as a percent of assets, they were 18 percent greater; and as a percent of stockholders' equity, they had been 69 percent higher. The outcomes were published in the Harvard Business Review.

A couple of researchers have begun to tease out the dynamics at work. One current study determined that ladies in senior management had an particularly positive impact on firms involved in study and improvement. According to data from 1,500 American businesses, from 1992 to 2006, the study used an econometric analysis to attempt to answer the chicken-and-egg question of whether much better firms promote women or ladies in power make much better firms. The authors - Cristian Dezso, a professor at the University of Maryland, and David Gaddis Ross, a professor at Columbia University - reported some evidence of the former, but stronger indications that women leaders exert a advantageous influence. "It's constant with this theory that ladies manage inside a participatory way, a democratic way," says Dezso, a style that is thought to foster teamwork and creativity.