Monday, January 5, 2009

My guilty chromosome

Merely being male makes me complicit in the financial meltdown:
I can't help noticing that all the perpetrators of the greatest economic mess in eight decades are, well, men. Specifically, they are rich, white, middle-aged guys, same as the ones who brought us Watergate in the 1970s, the Teapot Dome scandal in the 1920s and, presumably, the fall of Rome. . . .
Although the Y-chromosome is undeniably overrepresented along all tiers of finance, it is particularly overrepresented at the highest levels of power and in those sectors most deeply implicated in the current crisis. A Catalyst Research study last year found that women make up almost 60 percent of the workforce at Fortune 500 finance and insurance companies but account for only 17.9 percent of corporate officer positions and none of the chief executive positions. In the world of hedge funds, women are notable largely for their absence. . . .
Whatever the reason, the experience of the past year suggests that we desperately need to bring more women into leadership positions on Wall Street, in politics, in regulatory bodies and in American life generally.
Thus speaks Debora Spar who is (conveniently enough) not cursed with a Y chromosome. Interesting how that works out. Why do I suspect she's gunning for a position in the Obama administration?

1 comment:

  1. Debora Spar did a wonderful job in describing two overlapping bell curves with different standard deviations.

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