The Patriarchy Precipitated the Market Crash

Before you ask, no, I don’t know why I’m receiving Blitzes from WiL.

This week in Women in Leadership…

“Title IX CEOs”

Would the financial meltdown have been as severe had women held the top leadership spots on Wall Street?
Does participation in intercollegiate athletics provide valuable preparation for competition in the boardroom?

Here’s a great article:
http://views.washingtonpost.com/leadership/panelists/2009/03/title-ix-ceos.html

Wednesday night, 6-7pm. Morrison Commons in Rocky

Free Ramuntos

Apparently the Y chromosome may lead to financial crises. Here are some fun quotes from the article linked to in the Blitz:

Second, and again generalizing somewhat, women are more collaborative and less competitive in business than men; they’d be less likely, for example, to push an untested and poorly understood financial instrument so as to be seen as a Master of the Universe, or gobble up another company just so their merged entity would be bigger than the company of someone they wanted to best.

The power of Greyskull not only transforms Cringer into Battle Cat, it grants sub-prime mortgages as well. Don’t worry, though, the government will have fixed all this machismo investing through Title IX legislation.

Might it be that 10 or 15 years from now, when Title IX will have spawned a whole generation of women with experience in intercollegiate athletics, we’ll see women behaving as competitively in the boardroom as they did on the soccer field, softball diamond or basketball court?

So the problem was that men were too aggressive and the question posed is whether women, because of their moderating tendencies, would have mitigated the financial crash if they’d been in top leadership positions. How do they get to those top leadership positions so they can exercise their tendencies? By becoming more aggressive thanks to sports. Did I miss something here? The amusing part is that the article was written by Paul R. Portney, who is, according to the article, “Dean of the Eller College of Management at the University of Arizona, where he also holds the Halle Chair in Leadership.”