I recently came across this article in the Financial Times by Michel Ferrary of the Ceram Business School, in which he argues that companies (and the boards and senior management therein) with a higher number of women managers are better able to face the economic downturn. This finding will certainly find favour across a number of quarters.
However, the research that we have conducted–which spans 12,500 top teams and well over 2,000 boards–suggests that there is no difference in operational or strategic performance between male and female managers. In fact, gender emerged as the least predicted demographic concerning effectiveness of performance.  It should be noted that similar findings applied to education, sector, religion, geographical location and personal background. [...]