Two days ago I was sipping on
a ‘Café Latte’ when I overheard a woman on her phone discussing Finance to a
colleague on her mobile. Now, as you know…although I’m interested in World
Economics …my knowledge is minimal and
although I assume that I have an understanding …I’m probably fooling
myself…and… I haven’t got a clue!
I approached this woman and
asked if she could help me understand the womans role in Finance. She
graciously offered to send me an article about an experience she had not too
long ago…
Although a lot of the
information here still leaves me in the dark about Finances and the Economy. It
still makes it… a good read for those who understand Finances better.
I appreciate Mrs Denice
Paige’s contribution and although she wrote
with a Feminist outlook…it’s
worth reading.
This I dedicate to my friend Vassilis Argyropoulos! Who will probably have a better understanding than I
will ever have.
Enjoy!
“I got a call yesterday from a German TV station, asking me for
ideas for a program on “Is the economy becoming female?” The two women
reporters were particularly interested in the hypothetical question, “If there
had been more women on Wall Street, would the financial crisis have occurred?”
I’m afraid I gave them rather a more complicated and subtle response than would
fit into a TV sound bite, and one that goes deeply into our assumptions about
economic life.
The story they wanted—preferably with great visuals!—was about
how (as they see it) women’s greater communicative and social “soft” skills are
more suited to contemporary business needs than men’s (as they see it)
propensities to greater aggression and risk-taking. This drives me nuts, for
two reasons.
The first reason is
the reification of stereotyping, or as many feminists like to call it,
“essentializing” involved in this story. I’ve been quite fascinated with work
on the cognitive psychology that underlies stereotyping. It seems that our
brains have a strong tendency to group things together for easy processing, and
we then tend to think that what is easy is also true. One way to make gender
issues easy is to insist on treating males and females as a single group,
resolutely denying that any observed differences in behavior come from anything
but warped socialization. “Sameness” is an easy concept. Another easy out is to
think of males and females as nearly different species due to differences in
genetics and hormonal influences from the womb—the “Mars versus Venus”
approach. “Difference” is an easy concept.
In fact, research done on issues such as social intelligence,
risk-taking, or leadership styles usually find only fairly small differences, on
average, in adults or older children. Researchers in psychology summarize
these using d-values (differences in means divided by the pooled standard
deviation), which give an idea of how important cross-gender variation is
relative to within-gender variation. A d-value of around .20, for example,
which is in the ballpark of many d-values found, means that 54% of the scores
for one gender exceed the median (50th percentile) score for the other (Hyde, 2005). If you sketch the corresponding distributions, they largely
overlap. These are hardly “Mars versus Venus” findings. Researchers in
psychology are often cautious, as well, in making conclusions about the roles
of biology and socialization—as well as their interplay, as culture shapes
human physiological development—in creating any difference. (One notable
exception, however, seems to be in behavioral and experimental economics.
In what I have read, d-values do not seem to be generally reported by economists,
with the emphasis being put, instead, on the statistical—versus
substantive—significance of gender differences found.) “Broadly similar but
also a bit different on average” seems, unfortunately, to be a non-easy
concept. And, unfortunately, overlapping bell curves is not exactly the sort of
visual image that the TV reporters were looking for.
The second reason the suggested story line drives me nuts is
that it ignores a deeper level at which gender beliefs and gender stereotypes have
in fact strongly shaped behavior in the areas of business and finance.
Many stories coming out of bond-trading rooms and other realms
of high-flying commerce attest to a frequent macho, swaggering, risk-loving,
aggressive atmosphere, often alluded to in the media as being testosterone-soaked.
I see no need to question the veracity of these stories, having often
experienced an only slightly more subtle variant of this atmosphere in academic
economics seminar rooms. And certainly a tendency by many financial market
actors to take excessive risks, while showing a distinct lack of care for the
adverse results of these decisions on clients or anyone else, is a big piece of
the financial crisis story.
The essentialist story about what causes this atmosphere
attributes it to the participants being mostly male. The more subtle
alternative I’d like to suggest, however, is that it is the culturally
ascribed masculinity of the financial sector that explains both the
predominant maleness of its participants and a one-sided emphasis on stereotypically
masculine behaviors. Beginning with the Classical economists, markets have been
thought of as mechanical, populated by autonomous agents driven by
self-interest, competition, and a drive for achievement—all areas of life
associated with masculinity. Agents have often also been thought of as guided
by (masculine) rationality (though, with evidence of social-emotional herd
behavior, more people are coming to doubt that now). Meanwhile, considerations
of human personal relations, care, cooperation, the nurturing conservation of
life, and emotion—explicitly excluded from economic life by an approach that
tried to emulate physics—were read off onto the feminine-stereotyped realms of
home and family. These “soft” considerations have often been perceived as both
foreign to (impersonal, rational) market behavior, and unnecessary due to the
presumed “self-regulating” nature of markets. Women, stereotyped as the
carriers of all those denigrated considerations, have been also, in consequence
(and to the benefit of male consolidation of power), considered unsuitable and
unnecessary in such environments.
What is actually underlying the financial crisis, then, is not a
story of too many testosterone-driven men and too few caring women. Instead, we
should be in shock, wondering about why in the world we ever dreamed that
human-made markets did or could ever function using only one-half of
human-shared capacities. We, as a society, came to believe that emotions and
social phenomena don’t play any role in commerce and finance, and that care and
caution about outcomes could be thrown to the wind in these realms, by WHOEVER is
in charge.”
(Author: Denice Paige)
By:
Efi Kanavou
E. Kanavou( ΚΑΘΗΓΗΤΡΙΑ ΣΤO JOHANNESBURG
SOUTH AFRICA)
MEΛΟΣ ΤΗΣ ΟΜΑΔΑΣ
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