Companies with women directors tend to improve in performance

THERE has been lots of media coverage on the need to have more women on company boards, but there has been little headway on it. Indeed, the Corston-Smith Asean-5 Gender Diversity Study shows that more than half of the companies listed on Bursa Malaysia and the Jakarta Stock Exchange still do not have a single woman director.

The study, which covers 3,054 companies in Corston-Smith's universe, was done over 13 years, that is, from 1998 to 2010. All in all, it covers the top 75% of all listed companies in five major Asean countries, namely Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, Thailand and the Philippines. Among them, only Singapore despite its small size has improved slightly, with just under 50% of all its companies surveyed without any female representation.