So suppose they had done the study, and found no improved performance for women. Would they have published it? I guess the chance to get a result was roughly 50

So suppose they had done the study, and found no improved performance for women. Would they have published it? I guess the chance to get a result was roughly 50% (since stocks tend to go up or down, and the sample set of women-ceo-companies is probably small). As to your explanation 3: that's just the kind of thing people want to believe who cherish such studies. At the same time there were also women who failed as CEOs (as the article said). Sure, it's a valid hypothesis, but there would be many ways to test it. For starters, there must already be studies correlating IQ to CEO success. What do they say?