Free Knowing Your Value by Mika Brzezinski

know, I’ve read these studies about risk taking, but I don’t have the expertise to evaluate them. I do think that if you are a bit of an outsider, which certainly a woman in that position [as a government banking regulator] was then, and to some extent is now, you may not be blinded by the conventional wisdom, or the group-think, that is the views held by your peers. You obviously aren’t part of the club and therefore don’t have pressure to remain in everybody’s good graces in quite the same way. Maybe you can analyze things a little independently, and if you come to a different conclusion than the others, maybe you have the courage to express that conclusion.”
    But the flip side of that coin is, if you’re an outsider, nobody’s taking you seriously. Born was trained as a lawyer, not a banker, and she acknowledges that that played a role in her inability to force change: “I was not from Wall Street, which many of them were. And in fact, many of them were from the very highest ranks of Wall Street. And that, in and of itself, was a bit of a club, to which I did not belong ... I also think that they all knew each other to some extent from their previous
lives. They didn’t know me. I was in a small agency, much smaller than any of the other financial regulatory agencies. It had traditionally been a rather weak agency, a backwater if you will, that happened to oversee derivatives. And in fact, I think [the fact that the agency was a backwater] may have been the reason why, in that era, some women had been head of the CFTC, but no women had been chair of the SEC or of the Fed.”
    The FDIC’s Sheila Bair echoes Born’s sentiments. “I do think that to the extent you let outsiders into the financial sector, that’s good, and it really is a club world ... to the extent women have been outsiders, getting them in to take fresh looks and offer fresh perspectives is very helpful.” Did being the rare female working in finance put her at a disadvantage when she was calling for reform in the subprime mortgage market? “The media and others have focused on my gender,” she explains, “but I think just as relevant is that I am a Midwesterner, and I graduated from a public university, so I was never part of the East Coast, New York financial establishment. I think my frankness was unusual as was my outspokenness, particularly coming from the FDIC, which has historically taken a back seat among financial regulators. While some may have focused on my gender, I think my views may have been too much, too soon for others to adopt them.”
    I argue that as outsiders in the world of high finance, women like Born and Bair can think more clearly and offer new insights. But in practice, if you’re an outsider and nobody’s
taking your perspective seriously, your insights have no effect because nobody hears you. When I give her my reasoning, Born says, “Exactly. That’s the problem!”
    Professor Hannah Riley Bowles studies gender in negotiation and leadership at Harvard University. She describes diversity as a double-edged sword: “Diverse teams often perform better than teams that are less diverse,” but only if people in the workplace actually value diversity and want to benefit from the fact that dissimilar people will bring alternate experiences and viewpoints to bear on their input. “If you’re in a context where people say things like ‘diversity doesn’t matter, we’re really all the same around here, we’re color blind, gender blind, or whatever,’ then people feel self-conscious about their differences. Then those differences become suppressed, and the potential for communication failures increase,” she says, citing research done by Robin Ely and David Thomas at Harvard Business School.
    Born’s and Bair’s unheeded warnings about potentially cataclysmic banking practices could be considered communication failures of the greatest degree.
    Obviously there are still major obstacles that keep women