Our new NAFE Top 50 Companies for Executive Women list is out, and we’re excited to discover that women’s representation has risen across the board at the very top-most ranks of this year’s winning companies:

*Women make up 25% of the corporate executives at the NAFE Top 50, up from 22% last year.

*Women make up 22% of the executives with profit-and-loss responsibility at the NAFE Top 50, up from 19% last year.

*Women make up 26% of the leaders of billion-dollar divisions at the NAFE Top 50, up from 23% last year.

*Women make up 26% of the board of directors members at the NAFE Top 50, after three years of holding steady at 23%.

These aren’t giant increases, but they’re a clear sign that the companies on this list, which are committed to gender diversity in their executive ranks and have the advancement programs and succession policies in place to make it happen, are seeing some payoff from all their hard work.

And by payoff, I don’t just mean bragging rights.

They might have some high-minded ideas about being progressive and doing the right thing, but for most successful companies, the primary reason for making sure there are women among the decision-makers is because it’s a business imperative. Women are decision-makers in the homes of consumers in the United States and around the world, and reaching consumers is the primary goal of most businesses.

Deb Henretta, mom of three and group president of global skin care, beauty and personal care at Procter & Gamble, recounts in our February/March issue how she saved the Pampers brand – she recognized that the absorbency-focused marketing campaign (beakers of blue liquid, etc.) was missing the point and brought the brand back into the nursery with campaigns focused on cute babies and toddlers. “We’d gotten enamored with our technologies and manufacturing systems and in the process, we were out of touch,” she says.

The proof is in the pudding. Studies show that companies with more women at the top perform better. We ran the numbers on our own NAFE Top 50 – we created a portfolio consisting of one share of each of the 41 members of the list that are publicly traded, and compared the change in the stock values between January 2012 and January 2013 with the value changes in the three primary stock indices. Our NAFE Top 50 portfolio grew three times as much as the DJIA and outperformed the NASDAQ and the S&P 500 handily as well.

Granted, this is a very select group of companies – ones that make the effort to carefully nurture future leaders to make sure they’re not out-of-touch with the consumers they serve. But wait, isn’t that what all companies strive to do?

Krista Carothers is senior research editor at the Working Mother Research Institute and Working Mother magazine.