What If Women Ran Wall Street? Testosterone and risk.
Click Here To Read: What If Women Ran Wall Street? Testosterone and risk.
Introduction (via Sheelah Kolhatkar @The NY Mag)
Early in the morning on a typical weekday, men can be seen resolutely streaming down lower Broadway, braced against a pulverizing wind. They are preparing to enter their office buildings, put on their headsets, flick on their Bloombergs, and go to war. And if they look miserable—or weary, frustrated, angry, or petrified—it’s because they have one of the most emotionally taxing jobs in the world. Playing the market is a constant ricochet between panic and euphoria. There’s a reason the burnout rate is high. But the formula for succeeding in a high-stress financial environment is simpler than you might think. If you ask a trader, or someone who studies them, what the single most important factor is in determining whether a person will be good at trading, they will say that it’s the ability to control one’s emotions.
The trouble for all those men pouring into the trading desks is that recent studies suggest purely rational behavior may not come as naturally to them as gender stereotypes would suggest. A couple of weeks ago, for instance, the investment-management company Vanguard released data showing that men were more likely than women to sell stocks at the bottom of the market. Could it be that the fairer sex is better able to ride the ups and downs of Wall Street without letting their emotions get in the way?
“There were always very few women on the floor of the exchanges,” says a hedge-fund manager named Henry Lee, who spent years on the floor of the American Stock Exchange. “But the women who were successful at it were unbelievable.”
Lee is sitting at a trading desk with his friend Harley Evans, a derivatives trader at a firm called Mako Financial Markets, talking about gender differences in their line of work. “They never got ruffled, never got upset,” Lee continues. “Losing their temper? Never.”
“I think women can be very emotional, too,” Evans says, not entirely convinced.
“Women respond to stress differently,” Lee says. Rather than throwing the phone across the room, “women cry.”
“Well, I’ve cried, too,” Evans says.
“Not that I’ve seen. You cried alone in your closet,” says Lee.
“I cried in my beer.”
“The notion of taking chances is definitely more male,” Lee says. “Look, men are much more willing to take a shot on something with incomplete knowledge.”
Click Here To Read: What If Women Ran Wall Street? Testosterone and risk.
