Forget the board room. Women’s voices are barely even present on conference calls.
Corporate America’s most important publicly-conducted discussions -- the quarterly earnings calls held by almost all listed companies -- are dominated by men, who talk more often and speak longer than women, according to research done at Bloomberg’s request by Prattle, a company that provides automated research by parsing central bank and corporate communications.
In a study of more than 155,000 company conference calls over the past 19 years, Prattle found that men spoke 92 percent of the time. That’s partly because male executives and analysts far outnumber women in those roles. It’s also because men just talk more.
“Male executives provide significantly more verbose answers to analyst questions than their female counterparts,” Prattle Chief Executive Officer Evan Schnidman said. “One could surmise that male executives are more prone to speaking simply to hear themselves speak.”
The findings didn’t surprise Sharon Zackfia, an analyst at William Blair. She’s been in the business 18 years and said little has changed. “I follow some auto companies, where I’m the only female voice on the call," Zackfia said in a phone interview. When she does speak, “maybe it takes me 30 seconds to ask my question and I get a five-minute answer from a male CEO.”
That should trigger questions across the financial industry, Collyn Gilbert, a bank analyst and managing director at Keefe Bruyette & Woods, said. “Any time you see a statistic that’s meaningfully skewed, you should take pause.”
Academic research suggests she’s right. When women participate more in group discussions, the conversation goes in different directions compared with discussions where men dominate, according to Chris Karpowitz, an associate professor of political science at Brigham Young University.
Separate research done by Alok Kumar found that female analysts issue bolder and more accurate forecasts, and that stock market participants are aware of the skill differences between men and women.
Sad Statement
The eight percent of the time women speak on earnings calls includes boilerplate introductory remarks delivered by investor relations executives. Women make up nearly one quarter of the investor relations people on earnings calls, the area in which they have progressed the most, according to Prattle’s analysis.
"This is both great progress and a sad statement about appropriate gender representation among female executives and analysts," Schnidman said.