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Female-Run Companies Often do Better Than Male-Run Ones (Video)

Today's interviewee, Viktoria Tsukanov, is one of the executives at predictive marketing company Mintigo who did a study in January, 2015 that seemed to show that large companies with female CEOs "achieve up to 18% higher revenue per employee than male CEOs." The study, titled "She’s the CEO and She’s Sensational," used financial data Mintigo collected on 20 million companies, and determined CEOs' genders by analyzing first names, so it was not subject to survey vagaries but was a straight data analysis job. Could this be a case of correlation and causation being unrelated? It's possible. It's also possible that the revenue per employee figures are affected by the fact that female CEOs are more common in healthcare and non-profit organizations, while men dominate manufacturing and construction -- and, as Viktoria pointed out in a blog post headlined "Women Just Raised the Bar. Big Time." there may be other factors at work as well.

The "18% higher revenue" figure specifically applies to companies with more than 1000 workers, while companies with fewer workers may average more revenue per employee if they have male CEOs. Besides discussing the study itself, in our interview Viktoria talks about how male employees might want to alter (or not alter) their behavior if they find themselves working for a female boss for the first time. She also discusses challenges a woman might face if she is suddenly put in charge of a heavily male IT or programming staff. Other thoughts she shares have to do with finding mentors and dealing with negative people, both of which apply to people of all genders. Interesting food for thought all around.

24 of 271 comments (clear)

  1. Why the fuck is there a video by iONiUM · · Score: 5, Insightful

    And why the fuck does it auto-play when I open the article?

    1. Re:Why the fuck is there a video by Darinbob · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Still leaves open the question why in 2015 that web developers still haven't learned that automatically starting videos is a really bad idea.

  2. Federal woman-owned company bias by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative
  3. Clickbait? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    SJW, please....

  4. female run companies often go bankrupt too. point? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    feminists are the worst kind of ignorantly hypocritical sexists... and we can all agree, SEXISTS ARE THE WORST.

  5. Sexist article by r.freeman · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Would this article show up when talking about:
    "Male-Run companies often do better than Female-run ones" ?
    Would it? On Slashdot the news for SJWs - apparently.

    Btw such article would be correct (this statement is correct).
    Same goes for...
    Streight-run companies often do better than homosexual-run ones.
    Homosexuals-run companies often do better than streight-run ones.
    White-run companies often do better then Blakcs-run ones.
    Blacks-run companies often do better then normale ones.
    etc.
    Does anyone thing ONLY male CEO can ever bring a success?
    Of course not. What are you fighting with Slashdot?

    1. Re:Sexist article by hcs_$reboot · · Score: 4, Funny

      Sexist question: would you have clicked on the video if the girl wouldn't have been cute?

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    2. Re:Sexist article by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      No see if it was stating "male owned companies do better" it would be blamed on patriarchy instead of suggesting men might be better at something. However, if women do better, then it's brain neurology or hormones, or psychological differences or some character trait that women have more of.. It's not allowed to show men as being better in any area while playing fair. Socialist 'justice.'

    3. Re:Sexist article by david_thornley · · Score: 5, Insightful

      If a group faces discrimination, the ones that make it through the discrimination are likely to be unusually good. I'd expect the average woman to be better than the average man in male-dominated fields, and the average man to be better than the average woman in female-dominated fields.

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  6. Comment removed by account_deleted · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  7. HP & Xerox by Nutria · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Run by women, not so great revenue per employee.

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  8. 'often do' by YrWrstNtmr · · Score: 3, Insightful

    And often don't. WTF is this?

  9. Re:Totally Worthless by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

    Was very interested. Then realized that this is based on revenue per employee, which is totally useless as a measure of success. Enron had revenue of $100.8 billion in 2000.

    He give her a break. She's a woman. She doesn't understand math or the fact that companies need to turn a profit to be successful.

  10. Another ... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    ... data point.

    Of course, there could be a difference between 'run by' and 'employing only'.

  11. Re:Correlation and causation by wasteoid · · Score: 4, Funny

    Do we argue because we're on slashdot or is that just a correlation?

  12. Can we all agree that... by ashpool7 · · Score: 5, Funny

    ... we should ignore the trolling TFA and concentrate this discussion on the autoplaying video?

  13. Unless it's all women by OverlordQ · · Score: 3, Interesting

    They later went bankrupt. OFC it's Dailyfail, so take it with a grain of salt.

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  14. Re:Totally Worthless by king+neckbeard · · Score: 4, Funny

    In all fairness, she's just employing the same deceptive tactics of male run companies that make up bullshit with statistics.

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  15. What a well executed troll by sjbe · · Score: 5, Insightful

    seemed to show that large companies with female CEOs "achieve up to 18% higher revenue per employee than male CEOs."

    Let's assume that is true for a moment. The important question is WHY? The second question is whether the higher revenue is due to the efforts of the CEO or merely a second or third order effect of something else. Merely noting that some category of people tends to run companies with higher revenue means nothing by itself. They are spouting a fact and trying to goad people into drawing unwarranted inferences about the reason why. This is a top notch troll.

    The study, titled "She’s the CEO and She’s Sensational," used financial data Mintigo collected on 20 million companies, and determined CEOs' genders by analyzing first names, so it was not subject to survey vagaries but was a straight data analysis job.

    My first name is normally associated with the opposite gender and I'm male. This is a stupid way to determine gender. I speak from a lifetime of firsthand experience.

    Plus with a title like that I'm fairly confident that there is a built in bias at work here.

    Could this be a case of correlation and causation being unrelated?

    Gee you think?

    It's also possible that the revenue per employee figures are affected by the fact that female CEOs are more common in healthcare and non-profit organizations, while men dominate manufacturing and construction

    Let's add in the fact that female CEOs are generally under-represented in large companies and companies that choose female CEOs might be better at promoting the most talented person instead of their golfing buddy.

  16. TFA is a mess. by khasim · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The first problem is that this is not about correlation or causation. TFA is just a mess. Here's an example:

    There were quite a few other striking differences in leadership:

    Men tended to achieve better results than women in companies with up to 1,000 people, however in larger companies, female CEOs averaged 18% higher revenue per employee than their male counterparts

    Companies with female CEOs were more likely to work in the B2C space, while male CEOs were more likely to work in B2B

    There are more women in healthcare and non-profit organizations, while men dominated the manufacturing and construction space.

    None of those three examples have anything to do with leadership.

    That's "apples vs oranges" not "correlation vs causation".

    1. Re:TFA is a mess. by alexander_686 · · Score: 3, Informative

      To extend, we are not just comparing "apples to oranges", we are dealing with a pretty "revenue" is a pretty worthless statistic when trying to determine leadership abilities.

      Example: GM is one of the largest car manufactures by revenue. It is run by a woman. Unfortunately while GM has huge revenue that does not mean it is very well run. Which is not exactly Mary Barra's fault – she inherited a mess.

      A big problem in trying to determine if "female" leadership is any good is that there are so few data points spread across such a diverse universe of CEO positions. You are not going to generate any good hard statistical data this way.

  17. Re:Totally Worthless by Actually,+I+do+RTFA · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Well, they say that female led companies are more common in B2C industries, more common on the coasts (esp. New England to Washington D.C. ), and more common in healthcare industries, and in non-profits. They apparently didn't control for any of those.

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  18. Re:Correlation and causation by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    calling out hypocrisy is not misogyny

    FYI if you so much as comment on an article about women and your comment isn't full of praise, you're a misogynist.

  19. Special treatment by watermark · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Perhaps we can stop giving woman owned businesses special treatment now? No more penalties if you don't give enough contracts to woman owned businesses.