Paul Tudor Jones, founder of the highly successful Tudor Investment Corp., said a month ago during a symposium that motherhood causes women who are macro traders to lose focus. To say the least, he has set off a firestorm or two. He has since apologized for his ridiculous remarks. Yet there might be an upside to the brouhaha because he has inadvertently re-focused attention on women’s potential in the realm of trading and by extension operations.First, let’s explore Jones’ logic.
If it’s true that front office trading should be run only by white, straight men—a logical conclusion from what Jones said in a candid moment—then does that mean women should be relegated to the middle and back offices as those are the realms for women’s work? Or does he imply something darker—that women should not be in the trading world at all—that their real roles are as mothers and wives only?
Sadly, he wasn’t asked to dig deeper when he spoke at an event at the University of Virginia on April 26. Given the strong reactions he has engendered, I suspect he will be very guarded in his future responses on the subject. My guess is that he heavily relies upon very talented people in the trading room and middle and back offices, regardless of their sex. Talent, intelligence and the killer instinct and not someone’s sex should be the overriding concerns for those firms that want to do their best for investors.
An upside to the widespread attention given to Jones’ response to a question is that he has caused people to review a growing body of evidence that women may have certain strengths over men in the trading realm. First, there is no evidence of any analytical difference between male and female traders. In addition, other studies have shown that while men demonstrate more testosterone-infused risk taking that may or may not pan out, women have the potential to be more successful in the long term because they tend to be more rational and more practical about taking risks.
It’s also true that mothers who work on the trading floor (and elsewhere) have to develop time management and juggling skills that single male traders may not yet have. By necessity, the mothers have to be more efficient, more decisive about their time and—to Jones’ point—intensely focused. To be fair, an argument can be made that married male traders also have to develop these same time-management and juggling skills to improve their focus and stay on top of ever-more complex lives.
It’s a shame that Jones fell back on a stereotype about motherhood and working that has little relevance for the present. It would have been better if he had made the point that men and women who trade on the front lines and those that support them in operations and post-trade processing are actually three dimensional. You can be a parent, a trader, a spouse, a middle office senior manager, a back office managing director, a compliance executive and have a full life—regardless of your sex. It’s not a black-and-white, either-or world and never was. (The wonderful series Mad Men, which focuses on the Sixties, is making that point every week.)
While some may deny it, we are in the 21st Century and the world is a big, increasingly perplexing place. So is the trading room. Talent, experience and results will win out on the trading floor and I predict that we will see more women there over the coming years.
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