Companies in the top-quartile for gender diversity on executive teams were 21% more likely to outperform their national industry median on EBIT margin and 27% on EP margin. Executive teams of outperforming companies have more women in line versus staff roles. We used our US and UK data sets to test the hypothesis that having more women executives in line (typically revenue-generating) roles is more closely correlated with financial outperformance. We know from research such as our Women in the Workplace 2017 report that women are underrepresented in line roles; in our data set this holds true even for top-quartile gender-diverse companies experiencing above-average financial performance. Yet these top-quartile companies also have a greater proportion of women in line roles than do their fourth quartile peers: 10% versus 1% of total executives, respectively (Exhibit 3). Even aggregating the second, third, and fourth quartiles to avoid distortions due to smaller samples sizes yields a difference of 10% in the top quartile versus 5% in the rest of the sample. Exhibit 3 Leading gender-diverse companies have a higher share of women in executive line roles Gender diversity Women’s share of executive teams by role type (line or staff) quartile Percent of total executives All 7 14 33% 67% 1st 10 20 More women executives in staff vs. line roles 2nd 6 11 3rd 4 8 7% 14% Share of women in line vs. staff roles on 4th 1 2 executive teams NOTE: EBIT margin used for the calculation of above-median financial performance SOURCE: Company websites; McKinsey Analytics; McKinsey Diversity Matters database 11 Delivering through Diversity Diversity and financial performance in 2017