Research Findings Support Change-the-Gender

Therese Huston writes in the NYT,

Neuroscientists have uncovered evidence suggesting that, when the pressure is on, women bring unique strengths to decision making.

…the closer the women got to the stressful event, the better their decision making became. Stressed women tended to make more advantageous decisions, looking for smaller, surer successes. Not so for the stressed men. The closer the timer got to zero, the more questionable the men’s decision making became, risking a lot for the slim chance of a big achievement.

Pointer from Jason Collins.

An evolutionary psychologist would have a great just-so story to explain this. Women are gatherers, looking for smaller, surer successes in finding food. Men are hunters, risking a lot for a slim chance of bringing back meat.

As you know, I have frequently suggested that if I had the job of regulating risk in the financial industry, I would change the gender of the CEO’s at big banks. (Some people wonder if that means I would order sex-change operations. No, I would also give the CEO the option of stepping down to allow a woman to be appointed.) I came to this point of view on the basis of casual observation of the different propensities of men and women as executives.

But now we have experimental evidence. Trust the science!

Just to be clear, these findings come from a methodology of which I am deeply skeptical. It just happens that in this case that the results line up with my own preconceptions.

10 thoughts on “Research Findings Support Change-the-Gender

  1. You’re projecting these generalized gender-based experiments unto a set of specific partly self-selected executives?

    Yeah, ok, whatever you think.

  2. Men and women do have different strengths.

    I’d go with the man executive to make the best decisions in the calm of the day. When the heat is on, then you put in the female executive. Like changing pitchers in baseball.

    • Is it so much, other things being equal, that you want a woman to make the high-stress decision, or that you want a woman on hand with authority in making the risk assessment?

  3. Going along with a fad: gender collectivism. Surprisingly disappointing in an otherwise circumspect and independent thinker.

  4. So women are more risk-averse than men? Get out!

    But seriously: sure the feminine strategy is wiser at times as any married man who knows what’s good for him will tell you. The flip side of that is that under certain kinds of stress a lot of women will just balk and disengage whereas a certain male pig-headedness and status seeking is just what the situation calls for. Did we really need lab games under highly constrained conditions to tell us this?

    As for the corporations with women execs doing better the article is sort of sleight-of-handish on that score. First, while no doubt Marissa Mayer exist and she is not alone, there are some very Robin Hansonian reasons successful corporations might hire women execs. Second this begs the question of just how typical women execs are against the average woman when it comes to testosterone, big 5 personality traits, 2D:4D ratios and other factors more typical of male execs.

  5. Great example of the Genderthropic Principle. Any research that reflects favorably on female gender difference will be published uncritically. Any that doesn’t will get the Larry Summers treatment.

    Also, see this countervailing research from Daniele Paserman of Hebrew University, studying unforced errors in championship tennis”

    “Maybe women play more defensively when the score is tight. If both players just keep lobbing the ball back and forth, there can’t be any forced errors, so all errors are recorded as unforced. In support of this theory, professor Paserman observes that women do play more defensively when the score is tight. (He measures defensive play by speed of serve, length of rallies, and so forth.) But, unfortunately for the countertheory, so do men. When the pressure’s on, both men and women get more defensive (and by about the same amount)—but only women make more errors.”

    That’s from Steven E. Landsburg’s old Everyday Economics Column at Slate.

  6. I make a similar argument for explaining the stability of the Canadian financial sector compared to the American sector. I think there is a self-selection effect that leaves Canadian bankers as more cautious than their American counterparts.

    If you’re a young Canadian interested in finance and are willing to take risks, the obvious thing to do is go to the States and get a job. It’s not even that much of a risk (same continent, same timezones, same language, similar cultures), and the pay is much better. So the people who stay behind to form the Canadian financial sector are the ones who didn’t want to take that risk, who wanted to stay home and be more cautious. And the financial sector they built reflects that.

  7. You frequently have curious ways of putting empirical predictions. Evolutionary theory has very tight predictions as far as social science goes. If this experiment went that opposite way, I don’t have an immediate “just-so” story for why evolution would predict the opposite. It would provide evidence against the theory. In other words, these aren’t “just-so” stories.

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