Justice, Gender, and the Financial Crisis

In response to a question I asked, Dana Goldstein and Ann Friedman offer up a very interesting discussion of gender, finance, and the financial crisis:

One thing they mention is this study showing that women are, on average, better investors than men. What’s more, my understanding is that there’s actually quite a lot of research demonstrating that women are, on average, better at risk-assessment. For example, women are much less likely to get into car accidents and nobody has any plausible theory of what compensating benefits men are receiving in exchange for our riskier driving.

It’s interesting to consider this, and then consider how male-dominated finance is, and then ponder what that tells us. It probably tells us something about a sexist culture and institutionalized gender discrimination on Wall Street. But it probably also tells us something about inefficiency in the whole market segment.