Credit data: firms with fewer well-paid women are riskier

Gender pay gap disclosures could be a proxy for credit risk, writes David Carruthers of Credit Benchmark

A burgeoning area of research in the past two decades has been the relationship between gender balance and corporate performance. Studies have variously found that companies with more women in their senior management ranks outperform – but only if the firm’s strategy is focused on innovation; that replacing a senior man with a senior woman produces an uplift of around 8–13 basis points in return on assets, and that greater gender diversity at board level results in improved corporate governance.