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Notes -
I can think of a few reasons that companies with a more 'diverse' or 'female' exec profile are more profitable.
1 - more profitable companies can afford affirmative action.
Some reports are coming out that the recent tech layoffs disproportionately affected middle-managers, women etc.
Some software companies were making millions with teams of 10-30 and then bloated up to teams of 300 or 3000.
2 - affirmative action is profitable due to federal contracts. Administrative rules or laws surrounding government contracts make it so that large companies that want to bid on large federal contracts have to have a certain %age of diversity or a certain %age of diversity spend. Ie they need to either directly have affirmative action, or give business to companies that have affirmative action.
Some companies launder diversity in such a way. They buy products from a regular company and sell the product at a higher price as 'woman-owned' or 'minority' spend or some such. I'm sure that has to be a very profitable enterprise.
3 - people that are familiar with such schemes may be more likely to design profitable companies.
Indeed, why start a regular b2b business when you could set up your wife as the owner and make it a 'woman-owned' company?
4 - new companies might be more profitable than older, bigger ones
It's a lot easier to set up a few women or minorities on your board when you are a small start-up instead of a publicly-owned corporation, or any large company for which leadership is intensely scrutinized. The individuals who would make 'appropriate' candidates from a business or shareholder's point of view may not tick the boxes that the DEI crowd wants ticked, due to under-representation due to systemic oppression etc.
The fact that the largest, most data-driven, well-informed companies in the world in all of history (Silicon Valley giants) are still mostly male, east-asian and european despite their own avowed, desperate efforts tells you all you need to know about the business value of diversity.
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