Hat tip to Chip Kidd for posting this. It’s for all the serious readers out there.
Game on!
June 18, 2012
Newsflash: It’s official, three-time World Champion boxer, Mary Spencer, is heading to the London Summer Olympics next month! Word came down this morning that she was awarded a wild card. When I interviewed Mary this past March, she was preparing for the Olympic qualifying tournament in China. Being the World Champ, most assumed she would make it through. She lost. For a month and a half her fate was hanging in the balance. Still, she never stopped training like she was going to London. That’s a fighter for you.
Here’s an excerpt from my profile of Spencer in the Summer issue of Glow magazine. If you want a peek into the photography shoot with Spencer that I attended at the Toronto New Girls Boxing Club, click here. Copyright prohibits me from posting the full article, but I thought I’d post a teaser because by the time the issue comes off the newsstand the Olympics will have come and gone.
Photo by Arkan Zakharov
When Mary Spencer reaches for her BlackBerry during breaks from her daily workout session — a 13-kilometre run at dawn, multiple sets of push-ups on her knuckles and enough consecutive chin-ups to make most grown men collapse in a heap … and that’s before breakfast — the exhilaration of this three-time world boxing champion from Windsor, Ont., is barely concealed. Tight hand wraps and the steady drip of sweat won’t slow down her action on Twitter. Social media offers a window into the disciplined world of an athlete. “My life isn’t really boring,” Spencer (@CanadianBoxer) posted on Twitter in March, right around the time she dreamed about Olympic competition for the first time and began counting down the days. “I just tell myself [it’s boring] so I don’t get overwhelmed with excitement!”
Until this summer, boxing had been the only Summer Olympic sport to exclude women, but come London, it’s game on. There, Spencer hopes to throw some of the biggest bombs of her life in the 75-kilogram middleweight category. And with the stadium gates now open to female fighters, Spencer is free to visualize herself ducking beneath the ropes and standing up inside the ring as the first Aboriginal contestant — man or woman — to compete for Canada in boxing. Frankly, her timing couldn’t be better.
[pullquote]Spencer is the first Aboriginal, man or woman, to compete for Canada in Olympic Boxing.[/pullquote]
Years before Malcolm Gladwell published his 10,000-hour rule in Outliers — it takes approximately 10,000 hours, or 10 years, of deliberate practice to master to a skill — Spencer was told something similar. Her coach impressed upon her at age 17 (the year she tried on her first pair of boxing gloves) that she could own the podium if she put in 10,000 hours of training for three hours a day, seven days a week for 10 years. She’s 27 now, and by those calculations, Lady Luck should be on Spencer’s side as preparedness meets the opportunity of a lifetime in London.
Spencer’s talent never matched this timetable or prediction. Ten thousand hours shrank considerably when just after three years of training, at the age of 20, she won her first world boxing title. Not bad for a gal who had no discernible talents in high school. “I failed gym class,” says Spencer (she cut too many classes). She was also suspended for a period for beating up a classmate — a boy, no less. “I got the best of him,” Spencer told a reporter at Global News’ 16 by 9, an admission that makes most people who meet her do a double take.
[pullquote]”I failed gym class in high school,” says Spencer[/pullquote]
Mary Spencer is no bully. She’s poised, soft-spoken and tall (five foot 11), not to mention a much loved mentor to dozens of kids who jump up and down on the spot when she pulls up in her white Camaro for her visits to Cape Croker, a reserve five hours from Windsor and the community where her dad, Cliff, used to be a minister. “I have some of the girls on my BBM so no matter where I am in the world, they can text me,” says Spencer. Her commitment and quiet self-possession are a reflection of someone who’s understanding of hard work and sacrifice runs deep.
The road to the Olympics is tough for anyone, but for Spencer it was tougher because she had to face her close friend Ariane Fortin, a two-time world champion from Quebec, in the final qualifying round. The two boxers are teammates and had always fought in different weight classes, but when the Olympic Committee announced there would only be three weight classes for women, Spencer had to bulk up and move into the category Fortin had dominated. “There’s no hate; it’s just taking care of business,” Fortin told the press before their deciding fight in January at the national boxing championship. But when Spencer raised her glove in victory after four rounds, it severed the friendship. “It’s a bittersweet victory for me right now,” Spencer told reporters after the fight. “I just defeated my toughest opponent in the world, and my friend’s dream is crushed.” Not long after, Fortin accused the judges of fixing the result. The rivalry between the two fighters will soon be featured in Last Woman Standing, a documentary being produced by Prospector Films for release on the film-festival circuit in 2013 and set to air on the CBC’s Documentary Channel. …(end of excerpt)
What would you do if you were unafraid?
June 7, 2012
What would you do if you were unafraid? Fortune favors the bold. So ladies, lean in. And never count yourself out. Men don’t need this advice. They already feel entitled, and so should you. Sheryl Sandberg explains:
Words to live by
June 5, 2012
George Harrison’s advice for surviving in a material world:
“Do not dress uncomfortably in styles which hurt: winklepicker shoes that cripple your feet and tight pants that squash your balls. Indian clothes are better.”
In conversation with Erin Cooper Gay
May 22, 2012
“In Conversation” is a popular Q&A Segment on “Society Pages” that features interviews with creative risk takers. So far, I’ve profiled Bruce Mau, an industrial designer turned global thinker, Maureen Judge, a Genie Award-winning filmmaker whose real life docs focus on family dynamics, and Evan Jones, a pioneer in Alternate Reality Games. Evan’s computer feats have forever changed our relationship to our phones, TVs and computers and have won him not one, but two Emmy Awards.
Bo Huang Photography
Last week I sat down with Erin Cooper Gay (pictured above). I met Erin a few months ago when we struck up a conversation at a Robbie Burns Day celebration. When I asked Erin what field she was in, she said, “I play the French horn with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra … but I’m switching careers.” After a pause, I thought she was about to say something like, “I plan to teach full time.” Instead, she leaned in just as they were about to pipe in the haggis and said, “I’m training to become a singer.” Career switches fascinate me, so I asked if I could call her.
Not many among us have the guts to follow a whisper in another direction, especially something as exacting and as public as, in Erin’s case, belting out love songs in foreign languages. She wants to specialize in Baroque music. Here’s what Erin told me about her move from the orchestra pit to centre stage.
AGJ: After we met, I went to your website and listened to snippets of your voice. [I invite my readers to do the same here]. When I heard you sing the libretto from Purcell’s Fairy Queen, I got a prickly neck. We’ve all heard about people who go half a lifetime not knowing they can sing or paint. Are you one of those?
ECG: [Laughs] No. My mom [Ann Cooper Gay] started the High Park Girls Choir in Toronto when I was seven and I was heavily involved in that until I was 16 — first as a singer, then a teaching assistant and finally as assistant conductor. And my dad [Errol Gay] was the librarian and a frequent guest conductor for the Toronto Symphony Orchestra. I grew up doing my homework in the stacks at Roy Thomson Hall and hung out a lot backstage. This was my world. I knew all the musicians from the time I was knee-high.
AGJ: With all that exposure, then, what did that little kid dream of becoming?
ECG: Ha! Good question. I always knew I would be a musician, but I didn’t know what form it would take. In the beginning, I was totally romanced by the idea of being in the orchestra. I wanted to be in the back of the pit cracking jokes with the boys because I was always a bit of a tomboy. The horn felt natural to me and I wanted to shine at it, but I’ve never had the same passion for it as I do for singing.
AGJ: So what held you back from pursuing singing first?
ECG: I didn’t see myself working to become an opera diva. Years ago, my mom was an opera singer with the Canadian Opera Company. She’s Texan and really charismatic, and I love that about her, but maybe early on I balanced things out by being more quiet and that’s why I chose the horn first. Like any kid, you want to forge your own path. With both my parents being musicians, I didn’t want to be known for doing exactly what they were doing.
AGJ: Was there a moment that changed all that?
ECG: Yeah. Five years ago, my dad wrote an opera called A Dickens of a Christmas for the Canadian Children’s Opera Company that premiered at the Enwave Theatre at the Harbourfront Centre. Dad and I were going through his first draft of the score and he asked if I could record all the parts for him. I did my best baritone, tenor and soprano voices just so he would have something on tape. Later, the singer who was playing Scrooge (a baritone named Mark Pedrotti) said to him ‘I think Erin’s really got a voice. Why doesn’t she come and study with me?’ I jumped at the chance because Mark is so wonderful [Pedrotti has performed as a soloist at at the Lincoln Centre in New York, The Kennedy Centre in Washington D.C., and the Mozarteum in Salzburg, among other venues]. At that point, I had just come back from Seattle after the breakup of my marriage, and I while I really wanted to play for the TSO [out West she had been playing with the Seattle and Vancouver Symphonies], I was starting to feel like I needed something else. I wanted to sing, but I didn’t know if it was going to go anywhere. Still, I felt like I had to take a chance. It was now or never!
AGJ: Is Mark your only teacher?
ECG: No, I have multiple teachers and mentors. When soprano Laura Claycomb came to Toronto to perform with the Canadian Opera Company as Gilda in Rigoletto, she took to my family. She’s a Texan. So am I. I was born in Alpine, Texas, but we moved to Toronto when I was three. I suppose you could say I’m fiercely Canadian, but with a Texan pride. Laura is from Dallas, which is where my mom is from. We all hit it off and Laura came to Easter Dinner at my parents’ place. By then, I had been studying with Mark for two years and he was saying that it was important for me to also start working with female singers. The timing was perfect. I met Laura, she offered to hear me sing, and what was supposed to be an hour meeting turned into four. We immediately discovered we work the same way, so we didn’t stop until things improved. At the end of the session, Laura invited me to her home in Italy. She’s been living in Europe for over ten years, just outside Turin with her husband “Tullio from Puglia!” [said with a lyrical Italian accent]. Laura was taking that whole summer off so I joined her in Turin, rented a room and we worked for three or four hours every day for 10 weeks.
AGJ: Are you working with anyone else?
ECG: After I met Laura, my world just opened up. I started singing for other veterans in the industry and they kept introducing me to more people I should know and programs I should take to hone my craft. In January, [soprano] Mary Morrison, [the guru of voice in Canada], took me on as one of her students. She’s 85 and made her radio debut on CBC Radio in 1944. Every single lesson with Mary has been gold. Her approach is very Scottish. She’s exacting and no-nonsense. Then not long after Mary I met Daniel Taylor, the countertenor. I went back stage after one of his performances with Tafelmusik. Later I sang for him and he said, ‘You need to come out to the Victoria Baroque Institute,’ and I was like, “Huh?” It’s so funny when Dan will say something in passing and it’s piece of music or a program that I don’t know about. He always says, ‘What do you mean you don’t know about X?! You need to know this NOW!’
AGJ: Didn’t you mention you’ve also been travelling to Quebec?
ECG: Yes. Last summer I met Bernard Labadie when he was guest conducting with the TSO. [Bernard is the founder and artistic director of two ensembles, the orchestra Les Violons du Roy and the choir La Chapelle de Québec, and has established himself worldwide as a leading conductor of the Baroque repertoire]. I was on second horn in the TSO when he was conducting, but I also worked with him briefly a few years ago when I coached the little kids who were playing the three spirits in the TSO’s production of The Magic Flute. Bernard is also very exacting and demanding and a fantastic conductor, particularly of 17th and 18th-century music. He remembered me and agreed to hear me sing. Afterwards, he said, ‘I think there’s something there. You need to work out some technical stuff, but I can help you with that.’ I took my dog Obi [a big, friendly chocolate lab] and we headed to Québec City last July to work with Bernard. He’s coached me several times since then. [In addition to playing French horn for the TSO, Erin is also playing for Labadie’s Les Violins du Roy and singing in his choir La Chapelle de Québec which performed the St. John Passion last Christmas at Carnegie Hall].
“Obi howls when I’m practicing my horn. But for whatever reason, he doesn’t howl when I’m singing. He likes to lie on my feet. Maybe he can feel the vibrations.” Bo Huang Photography
AGJ: Who’s your favourite singer?
ECG: Emma Kirkby, hands down. She’s the grande dame of early music singing and, in my mind, she’s IT. [Emma studied classics at Oxford then worked as a school teacher, singing in choirs for pleasure. When she started her voice wasn’t large, so she wasn’t a standout or an obvious star-in-the-making. But her fascination with early Renaissance and Baroque music, and all its associated instruments, was unique to the late 1960s and early seventies. Kirkby trained for decades, kept singing in ensembles and carved out a niche for herself, slowly rising to become Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2007. Kirkby’s awards are well deserved, but what Cooper Gay seems to be drawn to isn’t her volume, but the crystal clarity of her voice].
AGJ: Has Kirky’s voice affected yours?
ECG: Yeah, I gravitate to singers, like Kirkby, who don’t manipulate their voices a lot. I’ve always wanted a more natural-sounding singing voice, so I work hard on creating a more natural vibrato. For me, it’s not about adding more volume and vibrato, but freeing up my voice and spinning it. My teachers, like me, believe that there should be a connection between your speaking voice and your singing voice. I naturally speak quite quite low with some resonance, so for me to all of a sudden go, “Laaaaaaaaa!” [she screams a high F in my ear], is just plain jarring. I want to use a straight tone as an expressive tool.
AGJ: Hmm, I like that. I think I became a better writer the moment I stopped trying to be writerly and started making my writing voice match my speaking voice. That’s when I learned how to put a more natural tone and rhythm down on the page. I didn’t know that applied to singing as well.
ECG: You talk about singing naturally … well, I secretly always wanted to sing, not like this or that famous diva, but like a choirboy in the Vienna Boys Choir. Oddly enough, I didn’t understand why I couldn’t grow up and be a choirboy! I was upset that I couldn’t get the same tone — it’s pungent and so focused and, yet, has this unbelievable warmth and roundness to it that girls can’t come close to. I’ve always gravitated to that sound. I even think, at one point, I manipulated my voice to try and sound like a boy soprano. All the musicisans I admire say, ‘Go back to the text and sing it like you would speak it, like it’s the most natural thing in the world.’ When you do that it’s easier to connect with your audience.
A member of the Vienna Boys Choir
AGJ: What’s a typical week like for you?
ECG: Well, it’s not just singing and orchestral performances. I also teach horn to several students. And I’m still a vocal coach. Almost every day of the week I’m getting ready for my next recital, so I’m memorizing, singing over and over or listening to recordings and repeating the text and speaking it as if I were an actor. On Tuesdays I sing in a master class at the University of Toronto after which I run down to Roy Thomson Hall for rehearsals with the TSO. Did I mention I’m also back in school?
AGJ: No. What are you taking?
ECG: When I met Daniel Taylor, he convinced me to join his one-year advanced certificate program in early music, so I’m studying for that too.
AGJ: Wow, your schedule is full. Do you need a nap? Can I take one for you?
ECG: It’s a very busy time! And because I’m a freelance soprano I also take care of lots of organizing and self-promoting for my recitals at ateliers and small venues. One thing I’ve realized is that with an orchestra, you sit in the back, play your part and go home. The music director and the marketing department handle everything else. But as a freelancer, you invest much more of yourself not just in performing, but in organizing and event planning. At least that’s how it is when you’re first starting out. It’s A LOT of work, but I like the feeling of ownership I have over everything.
AGJ: Do you live in a house where you can really let it rip, vocally-speaking?
ECG: I live in a condo. Luckily the guy next to me is also in the music biz, so he gets it. He’s into digital recording. We’ve worked out our schedules but, still, I’d like to move at some point because it’s a bit expensive where I am. Ideally, I’d love to house sit for someone to reduce my costs and sing and play as I want. As a musician, you never want to feel muffled in any way. You need to be able to go to extremes to find your sound.
AGJ: Are you keen to see more people in their 20s and 30s getting into opera?
ECG: Yes! I grew up in a musical family and had this really narrow path and narrow perspective, so I haven’t really met too many people outside that world. The coolest thing about having my dog is that Obi introduces me to people from all walks of life when we’re in the dog park. I’ve struck up so many friendships with people in other fields and it’s amazing to tell them what I do. Some go, ‘Oh, what’s that?’ Others have so much knowledge. — like this one woman I met who said, ‘I love Prokofiev’s piano music.’ And I was like, ‘Really?!’ Baroque and early music is hot right now with the general public, and it’s lot easier to sell to the younger crowds.
AGJ: As a freelance writer, I’m always interested in the logistics of how someone pays their bills without giving up on their dream. I write, I teach and pick up shifts at a neighbourhood pub to make ends meet. How do you make it work?
ECG: I have a patchwork income too. And I’m not even sure I consciously designed it that way. When an opportunity comes up I go for it. I’ve always made things work, but maybe not in the smartest way, financially-speaking. Like going to Italy to study with Laura. I’m in debt right now from that trip and still trying to work it out with a money coach. To get your dream off the ground, though, sometimes you have to sacrifice being financially responsible up to a certain point, then figure it out later.
AGJ: Where do you dream of performing?
ECG: Severence Hall in Cleveland.
AGJ: Really? I was expecting to hear La Fenice in Venice. Why Cleveland?
ECG: I went to school at the Cleveland Institute of Music. And I went there because of the Cleveland Orchestra. The caliber of musicians in that orchestra is second to none, as good as any in Vienna or Berlin. I can still pick them out in recordings. I had incredible teachers in Cleveland and had the opportunity to play with the Orchestra nearing the end of my time there [she was subbing for them]. It was a thrill to sit on the stage of Severance Hall, one of the most beautiful concert halls in the world. I dreamed in college of playing for the Cleveland Orchestra and I did, so performing there as a soprano would be like coming home.
The power of pause
May 19, 2012
Maria Shriver has a foothold in all the major social media platforms: Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Pinterest, WordPress and, presumably, whatever promises to be the next best thing. Media and communications are her career. But how she uses them is worth noting.
There are enough voices on the internet going for cheap attention. Expensive attention, as Seth Godin likes to call it, is much, much harder to garner. But Shriver is one of the few who have figured it out. She believes it all comes down to the power of pausing—in life and in journalism.
“I’m asking you to learn how to pause because I believe the state of our communication is out of control,” Shriver told a group of graduates last week (including her daughter, Katherine) at the Annenberg school of Communications at the University of Southern California.
Speed should never replace good thinking, she said. But because our relationship to the internet is still young, it has. Right now, I think we’re tearing through digital media like a bag of Halloween candy we’ve dumped on the floor. The sugar rush makes us mean and cranky and dangerously loose with the truth.
With time, maybe we can approach social media more like a fine dining experience and in doing so use these tools with more intelligence and deliberation. We built these platforms and we can choose to change what goes on them.
Ladies and gentlemen, Maria Shriver:
So where’s the correction?
May 16, 2012
[A]fter a stunning $2 billion loss in European trading by JPMorgan Chase last week, the FBI in the U.S. has opened a preliminary review of the debacle.
As punishment, Ina Drew, the Chief Investment Officer whose London office orchestrated the trades, was promptly kicked to the curb. That lowers the ratio of male to female traders on the London Stock Exchange from a high of 260 male traders to 4 female to 260 to 3.
CEO Jamie Dimen remains. He’s been doing the rounds on the Sunday chat shows saying his company was “sloppy” and “stupid.” Meanwhile he’s been unapologetically leading the charge to prevent the caps on market speculation recommended by Obama.
And, so, for the third time in three years I’m reprinting a post I wrote on Wall Street culture shortly after the first U.S.-led economic crash.
Like I said before, if you think our elected leaders are in control of the economy and our futures. Think again. The stock jockeys are.
Being an average citizen sure feels powerless.
First published in March 2010
It’s been 18 months since the economy tanked, and the average investor who hung on during the worst stretch of stock market bucking and kicking has already regained most of what they lost. For many, then, it’s business as usual.
But if market corrections were inevitable, social ones are still pending, but possible, according to one of journalism’s best financial reporters.
I’m talking about Michael Lewis of Vanity Fair. He continues to doggedly turn over the rubble of 2008, assessing every detail with a coroner’s gimlet eye so he can come back and tell us exactly how traders back then were measuring risk and following abstruse formulas cooked up by their bosses to increase profits.
Still, after reading Lewis’ most recent VF features I couldn’t summarize his technical explanation of the machinations of subprime-mortgage bonds if my life depended on it (I’m referring to his articles,”Greed Never Left” and “Betting on the Blind Side,” both in the April 2010 issue). But that’s not because Lewis’s prose style isn’t clear or engaging. I have troubles remembering blow-by-blow descriptions of how people cheat (maybe because my instincts run counter to this). But I pounce on explanations that take a stab at why they do.
Lewis, a former Wall Street broker turned chronicler, is part of a growing contingent of journalists (Nicholas Kristof of The New York Times is another) whose strict objectivity has taken a back seat to their impassioned analysis of human nature. “You have to be careful how you incentivize people,” Lewis told Steve Kroft last Sunday on 60 Minutes in a discussion about traders and money managers. “If you pay someone not to see the truth, they won’t see it.”
Both Lewis and Kristof are gathering their data and making their astute observations from the epicenter of the best behavioral test labs imaginable: extreme greed in Manhattan and extreme poverty in the developing world. Kristoff , for example, cites studies that have found when “women hold assets or gain incomes [in the developing world], family money is more likely to be spent on nutrition, medicine and housing, and consequently children are healthier.” But when men hold the money, and this is “the dirty little secret of global poverty,” he says, more often they spend it “on a combination of alcohol, prostitution, candy, sugary drinks and lavish feasts,” not on their families.
Filmmaker Oliver Stone, the son of an honest Wall Street broker, is another surprise addition to this group of creatives pushing to see human nature’s better side come to the fore. Despite what most people think, the notoriously difficult Stone never intended to make Gordon Gekko, Michael Douglas’s character in his 1987 blockbuster Wall Street, a hero, but that’s exactly what he became in the minds of so many guys working in finance, he tells Lewis in VF’s April issue. Douglas still gets Wall Street hot shots coming up to him and saying, “’Man, I want to tell you, you are the single biggest reason I got into the business. I watched Wall Street, and I wanted to be Gordon Gekko.’”
Stone shakes his head at this. So does screenwriter Stanley Weiser. Both feel like their cautionary tale was hijacked by a misinterpretation that helped create the culture that led to 2008. Now Stone wants to use the sequel, Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, which hits theatres in September, to correct that initial misreading. By bringing back Douglas as Gordon Gekko and setting the sequel in 2008, Stone wants to show, in his words, ”the collapse of capitalism and the collapse of our society.”“Our way of life is going to change,” he tells Lewis. I couldn’t tell if that was his hope or a prediction.
Change only happens, though, when new points of view are folded into the mix. And while women aren’t new (!), hearing their voices in the halls of power is still unique. No one knew this better than America’s First Lady Abigail Adams. In 1776, just as legislators were gathering in Philadelphia to design a new independent American government, Adams, in her flowing cursive, famously instructed her husband, U.S. President John Adams, to “Remember the ladies.” Well, they forgot. But Abigail kept pushing anyway. “Don’t put such unlimited power in the hands of the husbands,” she continued. “Remember all men would be tyrants if they could.”
The more Abigail wrote, the more philosophical she became. “[John], you tell me of degrees of perfection to which Humane Nature is capable of arriving, and I believe it, but at the same time, lament that our admiration should arise from the scarcity of the instances.” You’d think she was referring to a room full of slick-haired stock jockeys high-fiving each other over a run of questionable gains (they were in powdered wigs and buckled shoes — all the same without their clothes).
Due to unfinished business, the ghost of Abigail Adams is still with us, touching down all over the globe and pushing for change. I’m convinced her spirit crashed the World Economic Forum in Davos Switzerland last winter. All of a sudden, and quite out of character, the participants (most of them, almost dead white men, except for the sprightly Rev. Desmond Tutu) began asking, “Would this economic crisis have happened if Lehman Brothers had been Lehman Sisters?”
Journalists like Michael Lewis, Nicholas Kristof and Charlie Rose (proud feminists, all), gloved that spectacular sound bite and refused to drop it, posing the question not once but again and again and again until what started as a clever quip turned into an outright challenge from the media aimed at a corrupt financial system.
The financial culture …is a pool of sharks, and women just despise [it],” Kristin Petursdottir told Lewis in his 2009 VF feature on the collapse of Iceland’s economy. In 2005 Petursdottir was Iceland’s lone woman in a senior banking position (she was deputy CEO for Kaupthing in London). But she has since quit and now runs a financial services business staffed entirely by women. “People thought I was crazy [to quit],” she says, but Petursdottir was determined to bring “more feminine values to the world of finance.” Science agrees, saying our financial wellbeing depends on it.
To my male readers, I say at this juncture, stay with me on this. We all want a better world. And if that doesn’t grab you because you secretly like the way things are, then I’m guessing you lost money in the crisis, so listen up!
The latest data from Vanguard, the American mutual fund company, reports that during the financial crisis of 2008/09, more men than women sold their shares at stock market lows. “There’s been a lot of academic research suggesting that men think they know what they’re doing, even when they really don’t,” said John Ameriks, head of Vanguard Investment Counseling and Research, in a New York Times article published last Sunday. The article by Jeff Sommer, called “How Men’s Overconfidence Hurts Them as Investors,” also said, “Gender differences appear to extend to other financial behavior. For example, women who are C.E.O.’s and company directors tend to pay lower premiums in corporate takeovers, saving their shareholders a bundle.”
It makes me wonder what would happen if we reversed the male/female ratio on the floor of the stock exchanges? In 2008, for example, the London Stock Exchange consisted of 260 male traders and 4 females. After a period of, say, five years, what patterns would emerge in the economy if this were reversed?
What’s more, a growing number of researchers in the last two years have been combining neuroscience and economics (neuroeconomics) to understand the roles testosterone and cortisone play in financial risk taking. In the spring of 2008, a research team at the University of Cambridge studied the spit of a group of London traders over 8 days and confirmed what most of us have always suspected: that testosterone rises in an economic bubble and these raised levels lead to irrational choices.
The researchers said that the relationship between market events and the male endocrine system was like a relay race. “When traders experienced acutely raised testosterone [levels] … they made higher profits, perhaps because testosterone has been found, in both animal and human studies, to increase search persistence, appetite for risk and fearlessness in the face of novelty.”
Like the “winner effect” in professional athletes, testosterone rises in the winning athlete (Tiger), but falls in the losing one. “This androgenic priming of the winner,” say researchers, “can increase confidence and risk-taking and improve chances of winning yet again, leading to a positive feedback loop.”
But, the Cambridge team also found that “if testosterone continued to rise or became chronically elevated, it could begin to have the opposite effect on profit and loss, exaggerating the market’s upward movement.” Similarly, in volatile times, a rise in cortisol levels in these guys — often by as much as 500 % by day’s end — exaggerated a downward swing (resulting in massive sell-offs). “These steroid feedback loops may help explain why [male traders] caught up in bubbles and crashes often find it difficult to make rational choices.”
The question remains, what can female investors, golf wives and rational male investors do to diffuse the extreme male behavior of a select group that, clearly, is capable of running us all into the ground?
Do you put each trader in a single enclosed office space away from his buddies? I say that because researchers at theUniversity of California published a study in March 2008 that found that men in group situations, like trading floors, are more likely to engage in risky decision making because they get caught up in issues of relative social status and dominance.
Or, do you pay female traders big bucks (big bucks because most hate working in hyper-competitive environments) to infiltrate this boys club and diffuse the cloud of testosterone hanging over the floor? A study from 2000 published in The Journal of Economic Theory found there was “a strong consensus that diverse groups perform better at problem solving,” than homogeneous ones. And, anecdotally, we all know that the presence of women is often the only way to diffuse extreme male behaviour.
Then again, putting more women on the trading floor would probably just spike testosterone levels even higher.
So here’s my solution: Spray estrogen in the air at regular intervals on the trading floor, play classical music, and enlist the mothers. Have the moms make daily desk-side visits with their boys so they can stroke their hair and feed them homemade lunches. “Now, Dear, stop drinking that Red Bull and eat this casserole. And why are you sniffing so much? Do you have a cold?”
We have to do something to calm them down and protect our assets.
Lest we forget …
May 14, 2012
It’s been said that the French don’t have a sense of humour (at least, not one the rest of us can discern). Then there are the Republicans (the U.S kind). They’re easy to laugh at, but not with. Samantha Bee was right when she pointed out that most Canadians regard Fox News as “a colossal practical joke.”
Going back in the archives, however, there is evidence of a deep vein of sophisticated, kooky and self-deprecating humour coming from the Isle of Manhattan in the 1930s — 25 West 43rd Street to be exact.
This was a time when the 1% was just as reviled, women were the same mysterious creatures they are today (plus a force to be reckoned with), and a liberal bias in the press was the norm. That’s not always a good thing, but at least the jokes are better.
Source: Whitney Darrow, Jr., You’re Sitting on My Eyelashes: An Album of Cartoons (my latest find at The Monkey’s Paw)
