Tory MPs Matthew Hancock and Nadhim Zahawi argued in their modish 2011 book “Masters of Nothing” that the banking crisis was partly due to a lack of women in trading rooms. Too much testosterone contributed to the debt crisis apparently. They backed up their argument with some mumbo-jumbo from neurobiology which basically dressed up stereotypes as science. Research just published by the Bundesbank based on an analysis of German bank executive teams from 1994 to 2010 suggests that this analysis is not backed up by the evidence. The research found that banks with a higher proportion of female executives “lead to a more risky conduct of business”.

So oestrogen-fuelled trading rooms will be no calmer…