Questions for Iris Bohnet, Professor, Harvard Kennedy School

There is some disagreement about the ‘business case’ for gender equality. What is your take on it?

The disagreement is justified. The focus to date has largely been on the diversity of corporate boards and senior management teams, and the problem is, we don’t have the data required to make solid conclusions. Even when we find a correlation between gender diversity on a board and a company’s performance, we have no way of proving that there is a causal relationship going on.

Recently, a meta-analysis came out, summarizing abou t 120 studies, and it did find a small positive correlation between gender diversity and overall firm performance. But again, this was a correlation, not causation. If we want to establish causality, we will have to create teams randomly and measure whether the more diverse teams outperform the homogeneous teams. Some of the best work in this area has been done in the realm of ‘collective intelligence’ (i.e. the intelligence of groups). This research has found a causal relationship between gender diversity and team performance across