[gurkendoktor]

Exactly: Most studies that I've been referred to are shiny McKinsey pages that boil down to big companies having more diverse boards on average.

Besides what you said, that's not a surprising correlation because it's easy for Multinational MegaCorp Inc. to have a multi-ethnic board after a few international mergers.

And then there are very opinionated shareholders like Vanguard and BlackRock, which receive voting rights for every Euro that I save for old age, who can make this outcome a self-fulfilling prophecy by punishing companies for lack of diversity.

I don't think it's possible to control for all of this.

[oneoff786]

I’ve done some work adjacent to those shiny mckinsey pages. The mergers wouldn’t explain it. It’s not looking at size, it’s looking at growth and success relative to where they were some period of time ago.

It’s probably a bit tautological. The only effective way to make your company more diverse is to grow and hire diverse candidates. This is not the case for top level leadership though. Boards as well. Growing companies want to invest in their people and that tends to result in some more attention to diversity. Conversely dusty old companies that are having their lunch eaten by tech enabled competitors do tend to be very non diverse because that’s they way it is and it’s not an environment that diverse candidates want to join. Also self fulfilling.

[nullc]

Board diversity can also be an indirect metric indicating a board that stuffed with irrelevant rubber-stampers: if all you need is a rubber stamp wielder you can pick whatever flavor of human will complete your box of crayons, but if you actually need someone's judgement or experience the selection is more limited.