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Women make up half of humankind, and it is reasonable for representative institutions such as corporate boards to reflect this.
女性占全人类的一半，企业董事会等代表性机构反映出这一比例也是合理的。
In 2022 the European Parliament ruled that at least 40% of non-executive directors at firms with more than 250 employees should be women by 2026.
2022 年，欧洲议会规定，到2026年，员工超过250人的公司中，非执行董事至少40%为女性。
Britain’s FTSE 350 companies hit that mark last year, on average. Japan, where only 18% of directors are women, recently told big businesses to get to 30% by 2030.
去年，英国富时350指数公司的平均水平达到了这一标准。日本只有18%的董事是女性，最近才要求大企业到2030年将这一比例提高到30%。
America's constitutional dislike of quotas dooms similar efforts. But its markets regulator wants firms to disclose diversity statistics, which may shame some into action.
美国宪法对配额的厌恶注定了在美国类似的努力会失败。但美国市场监管机构希望企业披露多样性统计数据，这可能可以激励一些企业采取行动。
Our annual “glass-ceiling index”, which ranks OECD members on ten indicators of female workplace empowerment (and can be found at economist.com/glassceiling), shows all this is having an effect.
我们的年度“玻璃天花板指数”对经合组织成员国的十项女性职场赋权指标进行了排名（详见此网页），结果表明，所有这些努力正在产生积极影响。
Across the club of mostly rich countries, women’s share of directorships reached 33% in 2023, an all-time high. In France, New Zealand and Norway it is nudging 50%.
在主要由富裕国家组成的俱乐部中，女性担任董事的比例到2023年达到 33%，创历史新高。在法国、新西兰和挪威，这一比例正逐渐趋近50%。
Is there a business case for more female boards, as well as a moral one?
增加女性董事比例，除了道德上的考量，是否也有商业上的原因呢？
In 2020 consultants at McKinsey found that firms in the top quartile for board gender diversity were 25% likelier to outperform their industry average than those in the bottom quartile.
2020 年，麦肯锡公司的顾问发现，董事会性别多样性排名前四分之一的公司比排名后四分之一的公司，业绩上超过行业平均水平的可能性高出25%。
Studies have found that appointment of a woman as boss can boost a firm’s share price and price-to-earnings ratio (though not its return on assets).
研究发现，任命女性为领导者可以提高公司的股价和市盈率（尽管不能提高资产回报率）。
Yet so many factors influence a firm’s profitability that proving a causal link between representation and performance is next to impossible; companies that perform well for other reasons may have the luxury to also pay attention to things like diversity, for example.
然而，影响公司盈利情况的因素很多，所以几乎无法证明性别代表性与绩效之间的因果关系。例如，业绩好的公司可能也有机会关注多样性等问题。
So instead, Margarethe Wiersema of the University of California, Irvine, and Marie Louise Mors of Copenhagen Business School interviewed directors at 200 big companies in Europe and America.
因此，加州大学欧文分校的玛格丽特·威尔斯玛（Margarethe Wiersema）和哥本哈根商学院的玛丽·路易斯·莫尔斯（Marie Louise Mors）采访了欧美200 家大公司的董事。
They found that women are consistently better prepared for board meetings, had better attendance rates and were more willing to ask probing questions.
她们发现，女性董事在准备董事会会议方面始终表现更好，出席率更高，并且更愿意提出探究性问题。
Female directors in other words, are “setting a higher standard and mitigating the problem of groupthink”. That should be a boon for corporate governance.
换句话说，女性董事正在“设定更高的标准，并减轻了集体错觉问题”。这对企业管理来说应该是一个福音。
