Women Who Spotted the Testosterone Overdose That Led to Financial Ruin - Building Gender Balanced Business

HarvardBusiness.org joins us in asking a question sprinkled throughout this site: “If women had been running our banks, might we have avoided the sub-prime mess and the resulting economic meltdown?”

• In an article carried by BusinessWeek.com, HarvardBusiness reports on the financier Halla Tomasdottir, who was one of two women to write a public warning to the Icelandic prime minister highlighting the dangers posed by (male) bankers in the country — a sector that shortly thereafter imploded amid excessive risk.

• Tomasdottir demonstrates a fundamental difference from those men: “[W]e didn’t invest in anything we couldn’t understand.”

• HarvardBusiness cites Cambridge University research that links testosterone to excessive risk as well as another study, “Global Financial Crisis: Are Women the Antidote?” from CERAM, the French Business School, that shows women have a beneficial restraining effect on the excesses of men.

• The CERAM research shows that firms in the benchmark CAC 40 with a high ratio of women in top management have shown better resistance to the financial crisis. One example is BNP Paribas, 39% of whose managers are female and which has fallen far less in the last year than other French banks.

The HarvardBusiness report, at BusinessWeek