Minister for Women and Equality Harriet Harman recently challenged the macho City culture, stating her desire to “pack the boards of nationalised banks with women”. So is a forced ‘feminisation’ the way forward for global finance? Lets have a look at the ‘evidence base’ of this proposal.

A year ago two Cambridge professors found that the testosterone levels of stock traders strongly influenced their risk taking behaviour. Recent research of the Dutch universities of Groningen and Tilburg found that male managers are more egoistic, better liars and suffer from a loose morale compared to their female peers. This surely suggests that more ‘City girls’ wouldn’t have been a bad thing in recent years.

However, famous historic examples suggest that not all women necessarily behave in ways we think of as being lady-like. Think of the ‘Iron Lady’ Margaret Thatcher or the Dutch Queen Wilhelmina, according to Winston Churchill “the only real man” in the Dutch government-in-exile during the Second World War. Most research does find that female leaders actually behave very much the same as their male counterparts. But this kind of research may suffer from a selection bias. To be more precise: the process we go through to select leaders today. Because studies that look at the whole population, not just current leaders, do find certain stereotypical outcomes, like women adopting a more democratic or participative style. So female leadership may actually be different, provided the selection of female leaders is not predominantly based on criteria that measure ‘how good a man’ they are.

Harman deserves credit for bringing into the discussion a missing element, going beyond the structural regulatory issues that dominate the gatherings on the future of finance, however important they may be. Culture matters, and for that matter also gender. At least in this specific case the female perspective has enriched a strongly male dominated discussion. Maybe a female Chancellor would be an interesting next step?

New Comment