I recently ran across an article which was titled “Of bankers and bankeresses” from The Economist (a British weekly magazine) print edition (August 6, 2009) under the “Women and the financial crisis” subheading, and I couldn’t resist offering my own comments on this article.
The article starts out this way:
“Would the financial crisis have been less severe if women had been running the show? Harriet Harman, Labour’s deputy leader, thinks so. ‘Somebody said that if it had been Lehman Sisters, instead of Lehman Brothers, there might not have been as much difficulty,’ she pointed out this week. ‘Men cannot be left to run things on their own,’ she told a newspaper.”
The reporters, to their credit, do approach that claim with a healthy skepticism. For example, they point out that the above statement:
“ … assumes that women are less risk-taking, less obsessed with money and status and generally less full of themselves than men, and so would have had more sense than to respond to the flawed incentives that brought down the financial system.”
And, of course, that’s nonsense.
For example, whatever happened to that standard female cliché about how “Behind every great man is a woman”?
Shouldn’t that also apply to those idiots who had engineered the financial meltdown and not just when taking credit for men’s great accomplishments?
What were the women behind each of those men doing while Rome burned … just fiddling?
Actually, they were
probably shopping
They didn’t need to know where the money was coming from, what was being done to hoover it up or to take risks themselves, only that it kept coming in ever greater amounts.
I’d be willing to bet that behind almost every one of the guys most responsible for the meltdown was a woman with very expensive tastes who was riding him like a jockey rides a racehorse. More! More! More!
And I’d also be willing to bet that the women behind such men had picked them out originally in no small part for their flexible scruples (to use a nicer euphemism).
“…
I’ve seen that pattern repeat itself too many times to count them all
…”
I’ve seen that pattern repeat itself too many times to count them all.
Are women less obsessed with money and status? Not in most of the couples I’ve seen over the years … just the opposite would be true.
If the woman wasn’t a good enough catch to compete for guys with his killer instincts already finely honed, she’d settle for the best guy she could find … and then goad him endlessly to push harder.
Are women generally “less full of themselves”?
If you know much about women, that one will also give you quite a chuckle (or maybe a groan instead).
And are women generally less risk-taking? That one probably is true. It certainly seemed to be the case when comparing most women I’ve known with most men I’ve known.
Why might that
be the case?
I suspect it’s because women can so often get away with taking fewer risks. A reasonably presentable woman who has no scruples about using her feminine charms to attract a guy with drive and ambition can “outsource” the risk-taking chore to him.
He takes the risks and she takes a large chunk of the rewards. And if he falters, she can give him the boot and look for a more successful replacement.
She’ll still be taking a risk, but it will be a different kind of risk: that she’ll invest in a guy who ends up not getting the job done.
“…
Would women run the economy differently if they were in charge?
…”
Would women run the economy differently if they were in charge? I doubt it.
After all, they are in charge. With women comprising 52% of the electorate, women by definition get the people in charge whom women want to have in charge.
And whom do most women vote for? It’s mostly for the male candidates. It’s a lot easier to be the back-seat driver.
Stay tuned,
-Mack Doppler
