The American Heritage Dictionary states an Ideology is

NOUN:
pl. i·de·ol·o·gies

1. The body of ideas reflecting the social needs and aspirations of an individual, group, class, or culture.
2. A set of doctrines or beliefs that form the basis of a political, economic, or other system.

So what? You ask.

Linda Basch, the president of the National Council for Research on Women (in the United States), has an opinion piece at the Christian Science Monitor that states

As has been pointed out with increasing frequency, a certain groupthink has been widely blamed for the economic crisis we find ourselves in today.

Barnard College president Deborah Spar dubbed our predicament a “one gender crash,” and The New York Times’s Nicholas Kristof wonders if we might all have been better off had it been “Lehman Brothers and Sisters.”

Studies indicate that women are more comprehensive thinkers and less attracted to excessive risk than are their male peers. It seems we have reached a fairly broad consensus on the meltdown: Guys were the ones flying too close to the sun.

Now that we’ve landed back on earth with a mighty thud – a little humbler and a whole lot poorer – it’s time to deal with the most important question of the day: How do we get more women into the good-old-boys network at the highest levels of the financial sector?

Generalizations kill…

A few points before I give you my opinion…

1. Perhaps the financial sector teaches/preaches a certain mind-set–sort of like medical or law school; and
2. Generalizations are always wrong and support Ideologies.

My opinion

Ms. Basch, with all due respect, is making a statement that I think is aimed at “prodding the pig” to get publicity for an upcoming publication–Women in Fund Management: A Road Map for Achieving Critical Mass and Why it Matters.

Makes you want to say, Hmmmm.

I want a diversified employee base, but to think that the people making up the employees define what goes on “in the sector” might be putting the cart before the horse…

The push in finance is to make a profit. Promotions and “fame” are handed out to those that make profit for the firm–arguably for the clients, but I don’t think that is necessary for them…

Good lawyers will tell you law school altered the way they look at the world. So to, I would expect, does most “jobs.” Meaning, police often have opinions based on their experience that does not, in my opinion, spread out to apply to everyone “similar” to those of which they have opinions about… Yes, read that again…

I’d like her to go look at women in finance and see what the “successful” women have been doing. Let me see…

1. Bodil Nyboe Andersen, governor of Denmark’s Nationalbank;
2. Ana Patricia Botin, the CEO of Coverlink, Spain’s largest Internet consulting company;
3. Abby Joseph Cohen, Partner and Chief Strategist at Goldman Sachs;
4. Dina Dublon, Chief Financial Officer, Chase Manhattan Bank; and
5. Patricia Dunn, Chairman at Barclays Global Investors.

Forbes said, in 2005, that Ms. Cohen was

Cohen has been a partner at this white-shoe investment bank since 1998, and CNBC and Reuters have cited her equity market forecasts as being the most accurate projections provided by any of the major firms in 2003 and 2004, though in recent years she has been dinged for being a wee bit too bullish on the stock market.

I doubt she would have been “dinged” if she wasn’t taking risks…

I would argue that most of them feel like Ms. Dunn who, in an year 2000 article about the most powerful women in finance, said

[T]he great financial services companies of the future will be those that deliver the greatest value for money to their customers.

“I know gender has posed fairness issues for many women, but I have never felt limited by being a woman. If the signals were there, I guess I ignored them.”

My guess is that companies do take risks to return the greatest value. Of course, I could be wrong…

Thoughts

Whether you look at Amelia Earhart, Henry “Industrial Revolution” Ford, or anyone else, taking a risk is exactly what is at the center of someone getting out and doing something that will “break them out of their mold.”

Without taking a risk, how would you ever do something that had not been done before? Whether you call it analysis, leap of faith, or risk, you take a step without knowing the outcome. To think that anyone moves forward without the analysis is, I think, the mistake.

So, I think Ms. Basch is wrong. It isn’t “men” that caused the financial meltdown. Rather, it is people in finance, their regulators, and the investing public (private companies, individuals, etc.) that got greedy and wanted “profit.” This “need for greed” is what drives the risk, calculated as it may be.

So before you go pointing the finger at “men,” think. I certainly could, using her argument, make many statements about “insert your group here.” The problem with any of those statements would be that the statement would be based on a generalization. Just because someone can point to some coincidence and make a statement does not make the statement true.

Drunk drivers get into wrecks. However, not everyone who drinks ends up driving. To say that men should not drink but that women should drink would be the wrong thing to say just because, in general, more men end up crashing while driving while intoxicated. One outcome does not mean the other is true. Rather, nobody should drive while drunk…

Of course, you won’t believe me…

I refer you to The hormone replacement - coronary heart disease conundrum: is this the death of observational epidemiology? by Lawlor DA, Smith GD & Ebrahim S as published in the International Journal of Epidemiology in 2004 (Vol 33, pages 464-467).

Let me explain. No, there is too much. I will sum up…

The study cited above concludes

[N]umerous epidemiological studies showed that women who were taking combined hormone replacement therapy (HRT) also had a lower-than-average incidence of coronary heart disease (CHD), leading doctors to propose that HRT was protective against CHD. But controlled trials showed that HRT caused a small and significant increase in risk of CHD. Re-analysis of the data showed that women undertaking HRT were more likely to be from higher socio-economic groups (ABC1), with better than average diet and exercise regimes. The two were coincident effects of a common cause, rather than cause and effect as had been supposed.

One is cause-and-effect, the other is correlation. As well stated on Wikipedia

[C]orrelation proves causation, is a logical fallacy by which two events that occur together are claimed to have a cause-and-effect relationship.

Think…Critically.