Time to learn some science. Start here.

While your suggestion is intriguing, would being an outsider also be an impediment to being a regulator? I agree that it lowers the chance for the regulator to be captured, but OTOH, so much of understanding a field is being able to “think” like the players, and so much information comes informally through old-boys networks and the such.

If a regulator’s sole job was to collect official data and compile reports and spot anomalies in the data stream, then I agree that women (or other people not susceptible to capture) would be great.

But I suspect that especially higher-level regulator roles require informal data of the type passed around at the local watering hole while talking about yesterday’s Yankees game. After all, there’s a reason why the NY Fed is usually tasked with keeping an eye on Wall St. It’s not as if the Chicago Fed doesn’t have access to the same objective data.

FWIW, I’m a guy in a very male-dominated field (not in finance, though), who’s had the occasional female senior and junior colleague. What I found is it takes a huge amount of conscious effort, even as a boss, to include female juniors in “the club”. But the effort was worthwhile because being part of the informal group was important to learning the field and developing their careers.

I wonder if the benefits of not being captured are outweighed by the decreased insight and informal data that often goes along with it?

As a female who did literature, have mixed feelings about what you said . From what can be recalled of math, physics and chemistry lessons, it wasn’t so much the difficulty level as the dead boring memorising, repetition of formulas, practise till you drop routines that “killed” the interest.

Expectations, particularly re women are always a dampener, still remember (what would be the asian equivalent of US grade school) a primary school teacher once said to me that I should improve my writing posture ‘cos I could end up being secretaryto the PM, mind you , not the PM or any politician but the secretary to the PM and the upshot of it was the school was an all girls school set up by french missionaries to allow girls to be educated who would otherwise not be.

Even in arts there is discrimination; a certain doctor at a prestigious university once said that it was surprising for (my classmate) a girl to do a session on Dickens as it was more usual fcor the guys to handle such a tough writer; and yep that was in the 20th century, go figure!

P.S. never did Dickens , at least not an essay but really ‘cos he was a real bore. BTW George Eliot was female too! (this is off topic but initially thought you were female, sorry! for some reason thought you were Eve/Eva!

That’s completely ridiculous.

Yves’ point was about regulators versus executives and traders in Wall St firms. Yes, Wall St firms hire lots of quants. They’re not the ones making policy or the calls on deals. The questions the regulators would be asking are things like, “Shouldn’t you be verifying that the appraiser/seller/broker isn’t taking a kickback?”, not “are you using Runge-Kutta or Finite Element Methods to solve your option valuation model?” Most Wall St execs couldn’t solve a PDE if their lives depended on it.

PS: I chose a handle.

First, there are a number of studies showing greater variance in IQ among men than among women, and thus, more a higher incidence of men at the extremes, and a lower incidence of men around the mean, than among women. Here are links to coverage of the studies:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?xml=/earth/2007/09/24/eamen124.xml

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/4183166.stm

Second, studies by the US military have shown that IQ is not normally distributed. Emperically, studies show more smart and stupid people than one would expect if IQ were normally distributed.

As an aside, I have no idea to what extent any of these differences in IQ are genetic or cultural, and take no position on that. I also have no idea to what extent these differentials in IQ impact performance, relative to other factors.

Is there bias at earlier levels? Perhaps. But in a very real sense, these subjects and the most recent applications require you to be up-to-date. Lags in employment will be fatal. Try taking five years off from computer engineering jobs…you’ll have to learn everything all over again. Same with higher level math. The latest applications change and new ideas come into play all the time. Do some females self-select because they know this? Or is it bias at an early age that steers them? Or is it honestly genetic predisposition? I think Larry got the short end because he was trying to ask these questions but, as usual, it didn’t come out right.

Perhaps I’m prejudiced by my experience with Wall Street firms, first as an employee and later as a consultant. Part of the reason for focusing on women was that they typically remain outsiders, no matter how hard they try to fit in. That would tend to make them less susceptible to brainwashing when employees, and thus a mind-set that could be quite valuable in a regulatory role. As Jennifer said above, it’s a class issue rather than a gender issue per se.

And I hate to point out that the impediment to “daddy tracks” is much more cultural than company policy based. I am going by dim memory, but the take-up by men of paternity leave is almost non-existent. Among the many two career couples I know, I can think of only one where the woman remained full time and the man did not, and that was because he was fired and tried launching a fund with no success. And from what I can tell, even though he is at home most of the day,

As if fathers are irrelevant.

How about a well-designed “daddy track” so that fathers aren’t punished upholding their duties as fathers?

Or for that matter, a “hubby-track” so that men have enough libido left after work to perform their conjugal duties?

These questions are at least as pertinent as any other questions anyone could ask about professional employment.