Why so few women directors?

Today's WSJ discusses the paucity of women directors (here).  There are good reasons and bad ones for appointing women to any board.  I don't believe that women automatically have an inherently different point of view or that their mere presence on a board will change its dynamics.  (Check out Enron's former board, which counted Wendy Gramm among its members, for example.)  But I do believe that individual women may have individual characteristics that might help particular boards.  Every organization has its own needs, and those needs will change from time to time.  But when an organization is searching only for directors who have been directors elsewhere (regardless of performance), and when most directors historically have been male, guess what happens?

For why I might be a useful board member for certain types of organizations, see here.

Interesting article.

Forwarded to me from my buddy Marc Stern (article here).

The economic crisis in a nutshell, courtesy of Dilbert.

See here.

Not just one but two great op-eds.

The first, from Nassim Taleb, in today's New York Times, points out that bonuses are not the best idea when it comes to bankers taking on too much risk (here); the second, from Joe Nocera, showed up in today's Las Vegas Sun but isn't on the Sun's web page.  It is on the New York Times's webpage (here).

Both op-eds remind us that it's important to pay attention to the facts:  study the behavior of people whose compensation isn't linked to the prudence of their decisions (Enron, anyone?) to see if bonuses make sense; pay attention to the the factors pushing people toward strategic defaults on their mortgages and try to think of sensible solutions (reductions of principal) as a way out of the mess.

What doesn't work?  Ignoring the facts.  For example, check out Andrew Ross Sorkin's column today on the continuing saga that is the H-P board (here).

Boards that don't pay attention to actual performance before awarding incentives?  Check.  Bonuses not linked to actual performance?  Check.  Reasons why underperforming boards need to consider different ways of finding good new board members?  Oh, about a few trillion.

Foreclosure follies.

See Joe Nocera's column (here) and Gretchen Morgenson's column (here).  There's been conduct unbecoming on both sides of the "bad mortgage" issue.  Let's see if we can start coming to some reasonable resolutions soon.

That "boom" you hear? It's MF Global Holdings going down, thanks in part to bad decisions concerning compensation.

See Joe Nocera's column describing Corzine's compensation here.

Musings about the Gupta insider trading indictment.

See here.