A call for companies to appoint women and people of color as board directors by Goldman Sachs’ CEO comes as women get more recognition for their leadership chops. David Solomon noted last month speaking on CNBC that a new policy this summer will “focus on women,” The Washington Post reports.

Companies hoping to win IPO funding from Goldman Sachs will need to have one diverse member on their board this summer, and that number will go up to two by next year, he said. “From a governance perspective, diversity on boards is a very, very important issue. We have been very, very focused on it. So we’re trying to find ways to encourage that,” Solomon said.

Solomon also noted that IPOs with women serving on their boards had done “significantly better” versus those with no women. The firm has four women on its 11-member board. “We realize that this is a small step but a step in a direction of saying, ‘You know what? We think this is right,’” he added.

A recent survey by Peakon, an online platform that tracks employee engagement, found women-led firms to be a boon for employees, both men and women, The Boston Globe reports. That survey of nearly 60,000 employees in 43 countries found that workers were more confident in their employers’ goals and strategies and viewed communications to be more effective when women comprised more than half the executives.

The survey also found that these companies were more effective in spelling out their mission, which spurred greater confidence in products and services, and that workers experienced more autonomy. This was particularly true when it came to work-at-home policies and dealing with less micromanagement.

“This study shows that the way [women] communicate is perceived more positively by the organization,” says Kasper Hulthin, Peakon cofounder. “More diverse leadership teams will make strategy more well-rounded for the whole organization and they would be better for the customer and the employees.”

Women are also better capable to lead in a space that is nearly 100% dominated by men, Allyson Kapin, founding partner in the W Fund and founder of Women Who Tech, writes in Forbes. The venture capital and hedge fund space is mostly led by white men who funnel “an astounding 97.2% of funding …to startups founded by men, and those are mostly white men,” she writes.

“If we’re going to truly disrupt the tech world and build solutions that solve big problems for consumers and businesses from diverse backgrounds (gender, age, race, nationality, income, education, etc.), while generating venture returns, then the ol’ boys club needs to radically change the way they do business and who they do it with,” Kapin writes. “They need to bust down their doors and rewrite their rules to welcome more women and people of color, otherwise they risk being left out of the biggest new deals.”

Morgan Stanley warned venture capitalists that they are hurting their own returns by not investing in startups founded by women and others from diverse backgrounds. Venture capitalists cling on to a “rigid” definition of what makes for a worthwhile investment. 

“This rigid application of ‘fit’ surprised us, especially considering how inconsistent such behavior is with the reputation of an industry that has aggressively sought opportunities to take calculated ‘expansion risks’ to invest in new and emerging markets—often with minimal precedent or data beyond their own due diligence to back the potential payoffs,” Morgan Stanley noted.

“The bottom line: VCs who aren’t actively pursuing investments in women and multicultural founders may be leaving money on the table,” it added.