Niamh Corbett is Vice President of the Equity Capital Markets division at Morgan Stanley and a mentor to a number of start-up businesses. She is a steering committee member of the Thirty Percent Club, a campaign group established in 2009 which aims to get 30% women on FTSE 100 boards by 2015. She also sits on the Global Advisory Board of Astia – a not-for-profit organisation committed to building women leaders and helping women-led start-ups across the world.

Do you think women ever will rule?

I think we are in a time where it is very important to have a balance. As some of the data behind the Thirty Percent Club initiative shows, the momentum is there (when the club started in 2009, there were 12.5% of women on boards; the figure now stands at 22.3%), but getting to the point where we have 100% of women in control is almost the flip side of the argument. What we are saying now is that we have too many men in power, a phenomenon which creates group-think and a single-minded train of thought driven by a very masculine approach to leadership.

If you flip that around to a position where you have 100% female leadership, 100% women ruling, you simply find yourself dealing with the same argument. We’re arguing for balance and equality. If you have a greater representation of women, then you have a better balance in the boardroom, which should in turn help to decrease group-thinking and allow for different leadership styles to really come to the fore.

Is it always a good thing to have variety in a leadership body, or is there an argument for having a unified force instead of a fragmented approach?

The data shows that companies which have more women on their boards – more than 25% female representation – outperform companies that don't. For example, there are two surveys, one by Credit Suisse and one by the think tank Catalyst, both of which have categorically found that from the point of view of shareholder returns, companies with more women on their boards outperform companies that don't.

If you look at some of the funds that are being set up in the US right now, they are actually tracking companies which have female leadership or which have a greater representation of women on their boards – it shows that balance is an attractive proposition.

In fact, as a number of social commentators have already pointed out, you could argue that one of the reasons for the financial crisis was because the banking industry was being run by men who were mirror images of each other. The lack of diversity and different ways of thinking combined with the fact that it was a very machismo, risk-taking environment... You could argue that, had there been more women present, perhaps the crisis wouldn't have cut quite as deeply as indeed it did.

When you say that having men and women on a board leads to a broader spectrum of leadership styles and approaches does that mean you think that there are inherent differences between men and women?