Читать книгу Inclusion, Inc. - Sara Sanford - Страница 40

Sallie Krawcheck, the founder of the Ellevate Index Fund, has been called by many the “most powerful woman on Wall Street.” She is also known for her widely public firing from Citigroup. In Krawcheck's assessment, her dismissal wasn't due to her gender, but to the problem of “groupthink,” which she ascribes to the lack of diversity on Wall Street. Her firing came after she pushed Citi's then-CEO, Vikram Pandit, to reimburse Citi's clients who lost large sums on investments that Citi had marketed as low risk.

Her assessment: She was punished for speaking out against the majority opinion. Wall Street's lack of diversity, she argued, created a “false comfort of agreement” from pervasive groupthink.

“There is no doubt in my mind that was a cause,” Krawcheck told CBS MoneyWatch. “I didn't see evil geniuses who perfectly foresaw the crisis, and I was at the table. They really believed what they were saying—that the risk was dispersed, that they didn't have much on their balance sheets.”

Krawcheck became one of the first high-profile figures to speak out publicly about how different the economy of 2008 might have looked if, instead of the Lehman Brothers, we had had the Lehman Siblings at the helm. She believed that greater gender diversity, which tends to correlate with greater cognitive diversity, would have helped to avoid the groupthink that caused the bubble to burst.

In 2012, a research scientist named John Coates, who formerly ran a derivatives trading desk, wanted to follow up on this theory. He found that male traders were significantly influenced by something called the Winners Effect—when men are “winning,” their testosterone levels spike, increasing their appetite for risk and willingness to take chances, even if the odds say not to. When they are losing, their testosterone levels are reduced and they become more risk-averse, even if the odds say they should bet.

Women, on the other hand, appear to be largely immune from this Winners Effect.

Coates wondered if greater gender diversity could help prevent booms and busts, and played it out in experimental market simulations. The answer to the hypothesis was a resounding “yes.” Simulations with exclusively male or exclusively female traders revealed substantially larger speculative bubbles in all-male than in all-female markets. In some cases, all-female markets even produced negative bubbles with prices below fundamental value.

A follow-up experiment showed that evenly mixed gender markets fell somewhere in between, where healthy markets thrive. Balancing the genders and risk-taking tendencies of a group could help prevent another 2008.