Perfect Marriage | Estrogen for Testosterone in Wall Street

When I first wrote “Two Queens and a Great Dame in the Wall Street Mist”, no one would listen to me. Originally posted over at BlogCritics, such radical thinking got me nowhere.

With today’s cover article at New York Magazine titled “What If Women Ran Wall Street”, I’m taking back my words, bringing them home where hopefully more people will listen to me.

I’m so much smarter since the day I wrote the original essay on men, testosterone and trading. I watched yesterday’s health care debate, with mostly Republican men defending the good old days of America’s founding.

That would be the days when women had no rights and couldn’t vote, although they could get abortions. I don’t have this Tea Party Desire to get back to the days when we killed all the Indians and introduced guns to the Wild West.

Life in the 21st century is not romantic fiction, and I would like the boys club to get serious about the future. Our John Wayne cultural history needs a shakeup, which typically happens when people grow up into adulthood.

New York Magazine writer Sheelah Kolhatkar asked Sheila Bair chairman of the FDIC, about new testosterone research implications for the financial markets, and her two top men had a good laugh:

 … the two men sitting in on our interview—Andrew Gray, her press director, and Jesse Villarreal, her chief of staff—burst out with horrified laughter, as if it were the most absurd thing they’ve ever heard. Bair responded more carefully. “With some of those academic studies, I can see what they’re saying, and I think there may be some truth to that, with the caveat that you should never categorize people,” she said. “Perhaps from a risk-management standpoint, having diversity and different perspectives and attitudes is helpful.”

While Bair is regarded in some circles as a prudent, risk-averse regulator who helped save the banking system, she’s made quite a few enemies along the way. She’s publicly feuded with Citigroup CEO Vikram Pandit, even pushing for a shake-up in Citi’s management. Meanwhile, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner has reportedly fought to push Bair out of her job. via New York Magazine

Bottom line, the question is whether or not the global economy should be run like a crapshoot. When men speak of the logic of the markets, there is little.

Being feminist to the core, I never struggled with the idea that female biology is different than male biology — even though the admission nearly got me run out of an Intel Conference by the PhD ladies from Berkeley.

Brain scans and studies on hormones have diffused the culture argument that basically said women are just like men, if only we weren’t socially conditioned to be otherwise. At a time when Conservatives like David Brooks want a return to pre-1960s days, when women gladly sacrificed for the nation by having babies on schedule, and using housewifery skills to support her husband, perhaps the real challenge is to bring balanced hormones and brains to Wall Street.

Men haven’t done a great job of running the world. This view is not an attack on men but an admission of fact. Rather than just acknowledging that perhaps a balance of testosterone and estrogen makes for a better planet, men deny the growing body of science that says this view is the right one for the 21st century.

With this premise in mind, I share my pre-Lehman fall essay: “Two Queens and a Great Dame in the Wall Street Mist”, written in Fall 2008. Anne