. Since then, many other firms, including Yahoo!, Facebook, Twitter, and Apple, have done the same.
Diversity figures did seem to make a difference, the team found. Every additional percentage of women on staff at the time of a company’s first announcement was associated with a 0.1 percentage point average increase in stock price. Meaning, all else being equal, if two companies released their diversity figures on the same day, the stock price of the company with 40 percent women would increase by one percentage point more than the stock price of a company with 30 percent women.
“Pleasing the regulator goes to the very core of the existence of this industry,” Lys says. His team speculated that, for political reasons, regulators probably looked more favorably upon firms with more women. So perhaps investors would value diversity in finance firms as well, the researchers theorized.article