This blog post related to the article entitled "So you think women would have saved us. Think again" with the strapline of, "we're told that what the world needs is more females at the top. So, I give you Hazel, Tessa, Harriet..." which was written by Catherine Bennett and published in the Comment is Free section of The Observer on Sunday 22 February 2009.
Simply stated, this seems closer to a diatribe, than an opinion piece on women in politics and banking. I have read this article, more than once, and I cannot see any purpose in it, other than to be excessively critical of some women politicians and to offer some gratuitous Sunday morning chauvinism to a diminished group of fawning and sycophantic sexists.
Let me start with the gentle mocking of Tessa Jowell, whose most important transgression – as far as I can see -seems to be her close association with a man who has been convicted of crimes; guilt by association in other words. However, what has this to do with the fact she is a woman or that she is responsible for the 2012 Olympic games or that someone is suggesting a sex change at the top? Nothing, that's what.
Then comes the situation in Iceland, and the old quotes attributed to Kristjan Kristjansson that "Men, especially young men, made a mess of things," Well that's a terrible piece of sexism by the feminists isn't it? Except for the fact that its an observation shared by a huge number of people in Investment Banking, so it doesn't make this a particular weak or uniquely feminist claim.
As for the suggestion " Rather than promote women who did not, so far as one knows, blow Icelandic whistles when their colleagues took spectacularly stupid risks, a new management team might have been picked from the ranks, say, of retired cod fishermen." It is simply daft, and has nothing to do with feminism at all. I know a number of senior managers (men and women) working in Investment Banking who raised concerns about dodgy instruments and even dodgier lending, and light years before illuminated scribes could work out what a CDO or a SIP was – if they ever did. In the 2nd QTR of 2005 I even submitted a report on hedge funds, credit and systemic risk exposure to HM Government, it fell on deaf years.
As for the well-worn cliché "Testosterone to blame", one needs to be deliberately ignorant of the financial markets not to understand that this was pretty much the sentiment when things were going well, as much as when things turned sour. So no, if anything the no Icelandic government is just echoing common business knowledge. As for the jibe about "nurturing", this is just facetious and fatuous nonsense. The new Icelandic government wants to bring about openness, fairness and social responsibility, hardly revolutionary, hardly a one sided feminist aspiration.
As for the following, what is there to say?
"Maybe," she said, "if we got some more women in the boardrooms, we perhaps wouldn't have seen this kind of risk-taking behaviour." Maybe if they'd got more Muslims in, it wouldn't have happened either. An aversion to usury might have dimmed, somewhat, the appeal of collateral debt obligations.
The conflation of the respectable aspiration to see more women in boardrooms around the world, with Islamic banking, is mischievous. This provides food for both sexism and Islam phobia. In fact, Islamic banking does not permit speculation in such risky objects, never mind take a dim view of them. However, the projected reality of a significantly increased number of women in the boardrooms of the world is nothing more than a cynical fabrication – unfortunately far from reality.
Then things go down hill for the article even more so. The author then revels in a bout of "what-ifisms"; what if Hitler was a woman, what if Luther was a woman, what if the bankers who had screwed up were all women, what if Nicola Horlicks was getting her Cocoa and sausage-sandwich with Bernie Madoff (okay, I nicked that from Harry Secombe), and so on and so forth. It's a lazy exercise in pointless speculation. But, as a good friend of mine from Los Angeles used to say, and typically as a retort to puerile "what-ifish" arguments, "if a frog had wings it wouldn't bump its butt".
Therefore, the counter-argument runs like this, the underlying hypothesis cannot be tested, because although comments are free, the underlying facts are incomplete and false, rendering the inference erroneous.
Now for this:
A job in the City, in its pre-2009 format, probably appealed to the averagely caring, nurturing woman about as much as a chance to do some humble, behind-the-scenes pro bono work may now attract Tony Blair.
As anyone who knows investment banking, fund management and private equity will know, there are women employed in middle-management and senior positions in these businesses, but more often than not, you will find fewer women working in trading or in the development of what could only be classed as the more riskier financial products. You will typically find more women in the middle office (where it exists) and the back office, and indeed in banking IT. So when it comes to an analysis of financial markets and the players in those markets, opinion and speculation are still no substitutes for knowledge and experience. The assumption that nobody in banking raised the issues of recklessness and greed is so inaccurate as to be an erroneous cliché.
As for conflating essentialism and generalisations, what can be said, even going into the argument over false dichotomies seems pretty close to a waste of time. Comparing and equating Larry Summer's polemic comments with someone who might muse about the generally accepted common sense fact that women are generally better at "nurturing" than men, is not a fair comparison. One is uninformed comment, the other is widely accepted as factual. To say that a higher sense of "nurturing" would help the financial services sector is arguable. Personally, I think there is some potential in the assertion. But then again, I only work in the business.
So, let me go back to the following:
A job in the City, in its pre-2009 format, probably appealed to the averagely caring, nurturing woman about as much as a chance to do some humble, behind-the-scenes pro bono work may now attract Tony Blair.
Why would that be the case? Is this an assertion that women in general are caring and nurturing, and because of that, would not consider work in The City? Why would that be the case? What is the reason for women rejecting work in The City pre-2009? Could it be that the City, like society, is still overtly patriarchal? Could it be that Marx was right yet again? In that, "It is not consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness".
It is not natural to find some New Labour women repellent, although it might be rational within the larger scheme of things, but to suffer from prescottic episodes is truly unfortunate, something I would not wish on my worst enemies.
So, to go back to my original issue, this blog commentary is fine, but there is one glaring flaw in the argument – or my understanding of the argument, and it's that there are still nothing like the same number of incompetent women at the top of politics and business as there are incompetent men.
In Spain, we have not even arrived at the same levels of equality as the UK. The women at the top of politics here are far smarter and harder working, for example, Fernanda de la Vega (VP Govt.), Carme Chacón (Minister of Defence), María Dolores de Cospedal (General Secretary of the PP), Soraya Sáenz de Santamaría (spokesperson for the PP), Rosa Diez, Pilar Rahola, Cristina Narbona, Trinidad Jiménez and Rosa Aguilar (Mayor of Córdoba).