This is to long term for me but if someone else wants to research it... It would be interesting to compare a ten year average of price movement of companies after they get a female ceo, with a ten year average of indices over the same periods.
Before you invest in this theory, you should listen to the Freakonomics podcast on female CEOs. It appears that most of the time when a Fortune 500 company hires a female CEO, it's because the company is really screwed up, so the company figures they have nothing to lose (GM, Yahoo, etc.)
I don't think it makes much of a difference. To assume that men or women are inherently better is just biased. Both can do the job.
posh, yu need to immediately quit "breast-feeding" wid da fe's and start capturing NOAA's U.S. cloud cover on every market-down day to start ur quant bright-eye. (Just kidding; the more the data inputined, the better!)
What's important to know as a shareholder or prospective shareholder, when the firms appoints a new CEO, is what is their specialism, not what is their gender.