The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity

by Douglas Murray

And she used the opportunity to repeat what had been one of her favourite and most repeated mantras of the previous decade. ‘As I have said many times,’ she wrote, ‘if it had been Lehman Sisters rather than Lehman Brothers, the world might well look a lot different today.’12 This was not simply a reiteration of the problem of groupthink that had so contributed to the events of 2008. Lagarde was making a bigger point. Not only that women were needed in financial institutions. Almost nobody could doubt that. But that if women were more prominent in that workforce – or better still leading it – then the results and outcomes would be different. And Lagarde was not alone in making this claim. Indeed, versions of it ran throughout the decade following the financial crisis. And they centred on finance as in every other area of public life.