Hello, I'm Manuela Saragossa, and this is Business Daily from the BBC.

Picture this. You're a woman at a meeting, and you've just spotted that your male colleague has made a mistake.

What do you do?

You kind of want to, you know, put yourself down a little bit and say, you know, you're not sure,

and you don't even really like numbers. You don't even understand math, really, but maybe

these numbers might be wrong. Coming up, a comedian. She's the author of how to be successful

without hurting men's feelings. Plus, what exactly changes at a company when women join the

corporate board? That's here on Business Daily from the BBC.

2018 has been called the Year of the Woman. That's after female candidates performed particularly

well in the US midterm elections this week. More women will now serve in Congress than ever before.

But what difference does the gender composition of a ruling body actually make?

Well, in the business world, it's often argued that having more women on a company's board,

having more female directors, improves a company's productivity, financial performance and value.

But Renee Adams, Professor of Finance at the University of Oxford's Saeed Business School,

says the impact isn't always so obvious. People claim that they found evidence that having more

women can increase value, but likewise there's also evidence that it doesn't increase value on

average. So the evidence is really basically that there's no robust relationship.

What does it depend on then, where it does increase value or it doesn't?

What does it depend on?

Probably the people who are on the board.

I mean, so I've done some research with a co-author who's at LSE,

and what we found is that female board members

...