nce upon a time big bad corporations employed women because they were cheap, made good coffee, suggested diversity, and, let’s face it, looked a heck of a lot better than most men. Times have changed. Forty years after professional women first stormed the corporate barricades, those same firms are looking at us and seeing dollar signs. They’ve discovered that women deliver profits, often in big numbers, and that we are very worth hanging on to.
This is not just wishful thinking. A whole host of business brains, from Michigan to Norway, have uncovered an “asset-to- estrogen” ratio, which suggests two things: more women at a company can mean more profit, and every company in the Western world would do well to treat their professional women properly.3 It turns out that women are incredibly valuable and inconveniently expensive to replace.
Your company needs you more than you realize and quite possibly more than you need them. The numbers we are about
to give you prove that. Ready to crunch? Don’t worry, we’ll talk big picture; this is not an economics thesis. But these studies are so startling that we thought you could benefit from an up — close look at just how much power you have.