I worry when people talk about there being a business case – as well as a moral case – for making the workplace fairer.

Reformers who claim that appointing a female director or CEO increases a company’s return on capital by 10 per cent are playing with fire, for instance. Not all statistics will be so helpful.

Take a new study called Women in the Boardroom and Their Impact on Governance and Performance, by academics at the University of Queensland and London School of Economics (and flagged by the Harvard Law School Corporate Governance Blog).

Surveying US companies, they claimed that attendance at board meetings was better at more gender-diverse companies, where CEOs were also more likely to be held to account for poor stock price performance.

But the study went on to claim that this same diversity hampered their adjusted measure of financial performance:

The average effect on gender diversity on firm performance is negative.

The authors hypothesise that this might be because the appointment of female directors increases the intensity of monitoring from the boardroom to unproductive levels.

Frankly, I don’t care whether the financial performance stats are positive or negative. The moral case for boardroom diversity is strong enough in itself.

Further reading: a new MBA Gym workout on corporate social responsibility, giving an interactive taste of how the subject is tackled at business school.

Another day, another business confesses that it has had a bad night at the casino. This time, it is Hong Kong’s Citic Pacific, which may lose up to $2bn from leveraged foreign exchange contracts.

How can corporate boards prevent managers from taking potentially-ruinous risks? Stephen Davis, a corporate governance expert, and Jon Lukomnik, a former deputy comptroller of the City of New York, have a novel suggestion.

In a column in Compliance Week, they suggest that executive pay be adjusted to reflect how much of the balance sheet executives have put at risk. If subsequently it emerges that managers played fast and loose in hitting their targets, this pay could be clawed back.

Of the 30 companies in the Dow Jones Industrial Average, 28 have claw-back policies to reclaim compensation awarded as a result of performance, which later needed to be restated. Similarly, we believe that if submerged risk surfaces years later to blow a hole in a corporate balance sheet, then executive compensation should be subject to a claw back.

Such a scheme could penalise those who gamble furtively with vast sums of shareholders money and get away with it. But are non-executive board directors up to this complicated new oversight role? Recent history would suggest otherwise.