I was surprised and encouraged to see that the Economist actually cited the papers they were discussing - this seems new, and progress. Way too often, news outl

I was surprised and encouraged to see that the Economist actually cited the papers they were discussing - this seems new, and progress. Way too often, news outlets refer to "studies" or "a study" without making it easy to find out what studies were actually cited. I'll queue up the studies to read later, but I am skeptical. I've looked at studies that claimed quotas for women in boards = more profit before and without fail, they weren't controlling for confounding variables. Usually it was as simple as "companies in Norway do better than companies in Saudi Arabia, look at the gender differences!" which is of course totally invalid. Unfortunately the way governments have forced women into boards via legislative fiat means it's very hard to control for the pre-existing economic state of countries: you'd need to compare two economies that were basically the same except for gender differences, or compare the same country before and after and then try to control for all other changes in the world economy, which is very hard. The article is quite balanced about the limits of these studies though. Which is good.