Financial aptitude depends on location and hormone excretion of gonads

Trading is no place for wussies. When the pressure to deal is on you gotta be ready to act, a few seconds hesitation and you've lost millions. Like weavers at looms, thousands of invisible hands skillfully weave astounding profits from the arcane fabric of financial instruments. Up until the end of the eighteenth century, weaving was almost entirely done by males. The prestige of the trade and the skills required were for centuries, in Europe at least, believed to preclude women from professionally taking it up. They might spin the thread but as far as weaving was concerned, women simply knew nothing about warp and weft, silly creatures. Male dominance in this area didn't let up until the first industrial revolution, when machines meant that rote procedures made things simple enough for even the fair female to tend the loom.

Two centuries later, another male-dominant realm seems poised to let the ladies in among its ranks. Unfortunately not soon enough. Though women make up half of the entire American workforce, and have made significant inroads in a range of managerial positions, they account for a feeble 3% of Fortune 500 CEOs. In the high-stakes world of hedge fund management, women are "notable largely for their absence." They are also notably absent in stock market trading pits. Although a few women have known the highest offices on Wall Street, mostly men man the helms and tend the masts of America's great money-making institutions. Accordingly, it is they who deserve most of the credit and opprobrium for steering their charges into great shoals of greed and confusion.

As the positivist residue of so much social science continues to influence our theorizing, many account for the grossly disproportionate numbers of females in these hyper competitive, winner-take-all domains by pointing to their biology. It's testosterone silly. The greater the prevalence of that notorious hormone, the more likely a trader or CEO is to take risks, risks which lead to great profits. Like Luke Skywalker tapping into his manly intuition before firing his torpedoes at the Death Star, the financial heroes of our age shoot from the gut. It has something to do with the deep primordial contingencies of human evolution, you know, women pick berries and men spear woolly mammoths. Females just don't have the hormones essential for the risk taking necessary in the fantasy financial world. As Obama economic adviser Larry Summer pointed out sometime ago, women suck at math and science (probably art too) because of innate insufficiencies, their brains are smaller or something like that. It's simple, if they had the correct endocrine system then they too could lead the world into debilitating recessions.

There will always be those who assert that given the same opportunities women would prove to behave in the same reckless, opportunistic and selfish ways as men. I say that until they are given a real chance, not just a few token exceptions, the Margaret Thatchers of finance are exceptions which prove the rule: It's a man's world. It's not a call for the stale notion of affirmative action, but perhaps selecting candidates on the basis of something other than an unflinching willingness to club competitors over the head at the first sign of opportunity. All this aggressive, split-second one-upmanship created billions of pretend profits. Surely women can't do any worse? Surely they too deserve the chance to make pretend profits?