Wait for it. Wait – what?!

Bad news from Deloitte for women in management on this International Women’s Day. Deloitte has examined more than 18,000 companies in 50 countries and found women are unlikely to reach “parity in the boardroom” before 2038.

That’s enough time for careers to make or break several times over. Deloitte’s figures showed 8.4% of the world’s boards are chaired by women, while just 6% of them have female chief executives.

That’s a run of bad news of the equity front that includes research from headhunters Heidrick & Struggles and data providers MSCI as well as Green Park, also search consultants.

It’s all proof, perhaps, that when boards become stricken by uncertain economic times, they dig in and become more conservative. If you are a woman with eyes on a career, you could be forgiven for thinking about something other than business right now.

Move over, Starlink

Congrats to the headline writers over at Investment Magazine, who had to come up with a catchy header for a piece by Russell Baker on Elon Musk’s run-in with a Delaware Court, which recently tossed out his $58bn pay packet from Tesla as “an unfathomable sum”.

Russell quite rightly argues the point that the ruling raises all sorts of governance issues, especially for a man set on colonising Mars.

But special mention must go to the sub-editor who penned the headline for these observations: “Musk is from Mars, independent directors are from Venus.” This may explain some of the issues with the pay packet: neither Musk nor the directors understood our Earthly ways.

(Middle) way to go

Board Agenda is all for taking a philosophical view of business. We’ve never been above a bit of beard-stroking. But researchers at Dongbei University in China take it very seriously indeed.

One business boffin, Xiaonan Sun, looked at whether a company’s perception of climate risk affects its “propensity” for compliance violations.

The research concludes that an “enhanced perception of climate risk” is related to a higher likelihood of “violations”. The article concludes this is due to “stress transmission”. The greater the stress of dealing with climate risk, the more likely business leaders are to make short-sighted decisions.

But not in all cases. The paper offers the detail that where managers are “heavily influenced” by Confucian culture, as well as “strong” equity incentives and strong internal controls, the likelihood of violations drops.

Board Agenda turned for wisdom to our battered copy of the Analects (always beside the laptop, really) and found this in 4.16: “The gentleman understands righteousness, whereas the petty man understands profit.” Tell it like it is, Confucius, tell it like it is.