On September 4 2006, a company that is now in the FTSE 100 appointed two women to its board as non-executive directors. Since that day, the share price of that company has gone up by 18 per cent while the market has gone down by 28 per cent.
As one of those women happens to be me, I would like to argue that the first fact has brought about the second. But since being a non-exec means one has to look hard at numbers and try to be sensible about them, I feel obliged to point out that the outperformance is due to other things; the fact that two women have pitched up for about nine meetings a year has precisely nothing to do with it.
However, this outperformance makes me a part of a new statistical orthodoxy that claims to have established a definite link between women and money. In the past two weeks, this link has been thrust down my throat twice. First, at a dinner in London last week for senior working women this link was simply stated as a fact. And then, more forcefully, it was stated in a new book called Womenomics* written by two US television presenters.