Michelle Ryan and her colleagues noticed a curious pattern when they looked at the share-price performance of the top 100 companies in the UK, both before and after the appointment of male and female board members. In the months before a man was appointed to the board of directors, company performance was relatively stable. But women tended to be appointed after a period of consistently low performance. In other words, women were being appointed to positions ‘associated with a higher risk of failure, and [that] were therefore more precarious.’
Exhibit B: Marissa Mayer. No-one on this planet could have turned Yahoo around.
