Why companies should hire female stars

From Harvard Business Review (via Evolutionary Psychology discussion group):
"About four years ago, with the war for talent in high gear, my colleagues and I wrote an article in these pages warning managers of the risks in hiring star performers away from competitors. After studying the fortunes of more than 1,000 star stock analysts, we found that when a star switches companies, not only does his performance plunge, but so does the market value of his new company. What’s more, these players don’t tend to stay with their new organizations for very long, despite the generous pay packages that lured them in. Everybody loses out.

But further analysis of the data, which I’ve done over the past three years, reveals that it’s not that simple. One group of analysts reliably maintained their stardom after changing employers: women. Unlike their male counterparts, female stars (189 star women, 18% of the star analysts in the original study) who switched firms performed just as well, in the aggregate, as those who stayed put. And while investors appear to believe that companies are overpaying for male stars or anticipate a drop in performance for men, this is not so for female stars. Firms acquiring male stars experienced a significant share-price loss of 0.93%, whereas the acquisitions of female stars generated a nonsignificant share-price increase of 0.07%."