To find out if businesses talk the talk and walk the walk, the researchers parsed the shareholder reports and investor documents of S&P 500 companies.Using natural language processing techniques, they analyzed some 43,000 files, containing more than 1.2 billion words.And they looked for associations between words that signify women, like she and her.And words typically associated with leadership, like assertive or ambitious or effective.One way to think of it is if you had an autocomplete system like you use on your phone and you said “she is…” it would be like, how likely is it that the next word is “powerful”?Once they assessed this association…We then asked: how do these associations change when you hire women as leaders?And we saw the same pattern across all of this data: that hiring women as senior leaders led to an increased association with those leadership-congruent traits.And it wasn’t that the companies were extolling the virtues of their own specific staff.So it’s not just discussion of those new CEOs and board members.But actually generalizes to discussion of women more broadly.So we were heartened to see this result.At the same time, they wondered whether there might be any backlash.In other words, when a woman is seen as more competent, is she then considered to be less compassionate and considerate.Happily, we saw that there was no decreased association with being caring and these kinds of likable traits.Even better, the data suggests that the organizations that saw the biggest boost in female-linked leadership language are more likely to hire even more women.
