Women’s Work

About this programme by Peter Day

Men created the great credit bubble that we are now living through the aftermath of, yes? Sounds sexist or silly, but perhaps there’s quite a lot of truth in it. The thought has certainly been voiced in public recently.

In the financial markets over the past decade, animal spirits ruled OK. Risks were ignored as the adrenaline churned, sending cheap money though the system. Very masculine behaviour?

The economists were called in to certify that risk had been tamed: that securitised debt was parcelled out to people who knew what they were buying, by people who knew what they were doing.

The highly trained, super-confident MBAs created a hugely effective production pipeline, dividing up financial instruments so that each parcel produced a fee, and nobody-not the credit rating agencies, not the regulators-could see the overall picture. The dreadful truth.

A top economist who worked at Citibank in the 1970s tells the story of what the markets were like even then. The first thing one trader would do every morning would be to take a trip to the men’s room to be violently sick, hands down the throat. Not bulimia, but his preparation for the trading day.

Warriors

This is a man’s world, and maybe-just maybe-its excesses are male only excesses.

Women are sick in the early stages of that wondrous thing called pregnancy. Market men psych themselves up every day for work.

Middle ranking businessmen embarking on a sales trip think of themselves as “road warriors”. Business as war is a pretty silly simile, and a dangerously misleading one. But it goes back to the days of the men out hunting animals so that the tribe can eat.

Have we not evolved a little since then?

OK, here’s another sexist or silly remark to follow the first one at the start of this piece. Men got us into this Credit Crunch mess; let women get us out of it.

There may be something in that proposition. It does appear that while men get stuck into single issues, women do have the ability to juggle several things at the same time, and to bring that wider view into the assessments they have to take; perhaps round a boardroom table.

Except of course, there are still not very many women round those top boardroom tables.

The ones that are may find themselves in a mainly man’s world where men reporting to men produce the ideas reports and analysis about what the business is doing and where it is going. Ignoring the risks and the perils until they are obvious to everyone.

Governance

This lack of many women on company boards makes it difficult to come to any particular conclusion, though a recent London School of Economics study seemed to show that companies with a greater proportion of women on the board actually did worse than others in profitability and at share value.

There was some suggestion that perhaps they were worse because they took things such as corporate governance more seriously.

Some research points in different directions, but the lack of womanly companies make it difficult to find any sort of norm.

And as this programme demonstrates, it is not easy to get women to agree with the proposition that there’s a big role for them in sorting out the male Credit Crunch mess. Some are wary that this is another trap for women: an invitation to fail at a tremendous task.

And many are simply too modest; they talk about equality in the boardroom, not different-or better-thinking. They shun the ideas of boardroom quotas for minorities.

But if business is still a very male world which fails so rhythmically and spectacularly, then surely it’s time to seek elsewhere for ideas about how to run a bank or a business?

And-look at the numbers-top level women are one neglected resource that might be worth a try.