Women CFOS Are Outperforming Men — And The Specifics May Surprise You

Before she began her academic career, Kate Suslava worked as an auditor for accounting giant EY and later, for Hearst. She noticed that at the finance world’s entry level, women are fairly well-represented—“pretty much 50/50,” she says. “But as you go up the ladder, there are fewer and fewer women. And the ones who remained were getting evaluated differently than men when it comes to promotions and bonuses.”

When Suslava, now a professor at Bucknell University’s Freeman College of Management, began her PhD studies, she saw an opportunity to combine her undergraduate degree in linguistics with her MBA in accounting and really parse the differences in how men and women communicate. Her groundbreaking research, which analyzed transcripts from more than 105,000 earnings calls of nearly 5,000 publicly traded companies, found that female CFOs tend to be more concise and less optimistic, are clearer in their language and use fewer cliches or idioms, and provide more numbers in their speech than men. Those differences particularly stand out in the spontaneous Q&A sections of earnings calls, which tend to be more off-the-cuff and less scripted, and “are reflected in stronger market and analyst reactions,” Suslava says.