Male Stock Traders On Estrogen?
Photo by Flickr user Mari & Jeff. Used under a Creative Commons license.
Ann of Feministing cites an interesting twist on investing strategies. (Quoting a Wall Street Journal article, italics mine.)
Where Wall Street's drug of choice used to be cocaine, today it could be estrogen. A hedge fund broker working at SAC Capital in Connecticut sued his boss in late October for allegedly demanding that he take estrogen to become a more successful trader. The case was sealed when it moved to arbitration. A spokesperson for SAC refused to comment.
Seriously! The real hoot is that they want estrogen-enriched traders so they... make *men* take supplements instead of, oh, y'know, hiring women.
I dunno. Maybe it is a need for physical size on trading floors as Feministing commenter WendyAnn hints. But I bet there's some other reason.
That said, the effects of testosterone really are pretty misunderstood. In case after case, even species after species, aggressiveness and hostility usually crop up when levels *drop.*
I certainly see that in a friend who's lost his own ability to produce it. He gets a shot about once a month and he becomes terribly irritable just before, and cheery/mellow after. I remember reading on one article or another a few years ago about scientists giving animals enough testosterone "to make a coffee cup grow antlers" without causing any increase in aggressiveness. The tricky bit is that aggressive behavior, especially successful aggression, can *stimulate* testosterone secretions so... So it's still *associated* with aggression and risk-taking, just not the way most people assume.
And for the record, in my women's-studies/sex-ed/communications course last quarter, in a lecture on the menstrual cycle, the prof noted that symptoms associated with PMS show up when estrogen and progesterone levels are lowest, not highest. Meaning, she said dryly, that just like men it's usually inaccurate to say someone's feeling "hormonal."
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Note: I *still* can't believe they don't just hire women, though, if they want more estrogen in the workplace. Doi! Old habits die *really* hard I guess.
I can believe it. I see ads that say must lift 50lbs in the IT jobs of trading company. Since the companies are totally electronic, most of the positions have to with software, programming, data mining and analysis. You know all the heavy lifting stuff. I really think they think that men think faster on there feet and can deal with stress better. I guess dealing with analysis at their fingertips and stationary computers presents more stress that dealing with the normal behavior of human beings.
[Having worked in IT myself I'm a bit curious what might weigh 50 pounds any more. And even if men really are better at handling stress (quick, lift this 50 pound PDP-11 network configuration field manual!!!!) would that still be true compared to women if their bosses have them tanked to the gills on estrogen? Thanks, Five. --fl]
Why not just give people credit for being able to think and control themselves beyond their hormones? The science behind thinking estrogen would help a trader seems ridiculously shaky (and the science describing how it would damage his body is not).
Five of Nine: I never really thought of the "must lift 50lbs" ads as sexist (partly because my job has 100+ lb lifts and there are women of all sizes here who can do it), but it's certainly a creepy possibility. Come to think of it it's also ageist and ableist if lifting isn't a real requirement of the job.
Anyway, I can't wait for the whole "hormones dictate everything and gender differences are science!" trend in pop-psych to go away. Hormones have a lot of influence whether you're going to grow breasts and very little over your conscious thought.
[Well, don't forget the placebo effect of starting hormones in adulthood. :-) Thanks, Holly. --fl]