Lagarde no laggard in playing the female card

WHEN CHRISTINE Lagarde launched her bid to be the new head of the IMF last week, she declared that she would bring to the job all her “experience as a lawyer, a minister, a manager and a woman”.

The first three strands of her experience are self-explanatory – and formidable. But what did Lagarde mean by the fourth? What exactly is her experience as a woman? And how does it make her a better candidate for a job that involves flying round the world rescuing countries that are going down the financial plughole?

The most obvious thing that sorts out a woman’s experience from a man’s is that women bear children. On two occasions, Lagarde has spent the best part of a year with a growing lump in her abdomen and then endured the tricky business of getting it out. For most women this is a very big deal, although it’s not obvious how such an experience sets anyone up for running the IMF.

As children grow up, however, a mother (or, in truth, a father) can find herself doling out pocket money. Human nature being what it is, this often gets blown instantly on sweets, leaving nothing to spend on, say, a sibling’s birthday present. The mother then faces the tricky decision of whether to bail the child out and what conditions to impose on any loan extended.

I can see that dealing with such dilemmas could be relevant to a future head of the IMF, the only difference being one of degree: a greater number of countries requiring rather larger sums.

Beyond that, I am struggling to see how Lagarde’s experience as a woman is going to help. It is possible, however, that her female personality traits may come to the rescue. Women are popularly supposed to be more chary of risk than men and therefore to make safer leaders. Indeed, it may have been Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s wild appetite for risk-taking that did for him.

But this theory about women having a steadier hand on the tiller – much vaunted when Lehman Brothers went under and all sorts of people insisted that Lehman Sisters would have remained afloat – is not altogether borne out by the facts.

Last month, I went to a seminar at which Renee Adams of the University of Queensland gave a paper showing that the women who get to the top aren’t remotely risk-averse – even though the woman in the street may be.

She studied a big group of female Swedish company directors and found that they appeared to be more gung-ho about risk, not merely more than the average woman, but more than their male boardroom colleagues.

However, there is another piece of academic research I came across last week that could be used to help Lagarde’s case.

It shows that when it comes to the intelligence of a group, the presence of women lifts the results, even if the individuals are not particularly brainy. The study, by Anita Woolley and Thomas Malone and written up in the latest issue of Harvard Business Review, shows that the more women there are in a group, the more intelligently it performs.

If this is right, it suggests it might not matter terribly if Lagarde isn’t the best economist in the world – as various commentators have unkindly suggested – and not a patch on her predecessor. The ability of the IMF as a group could still, under this theory, rise under her leadership.

Yet there are two reasons for taking the findings with a large pinch of salt. First, any piece of work with a peculiar-sounding conclusion for which no decent explanation can be found is likely to be wrong.

It is even more likely to be wrong when the upshot supports a fashionable cause. Indeed, if the study had shown that groups with lots of women in them were more stupid than the average, I bet the researchers would have been sent back to the drawing board. I doubt if the results would have been written up admiringly in the HBR.

Which brings me to the real reason why playing the female card works. It has nothing to do with Lagarde’s experience of being a woman, her feminine personality traits or group dynamics. It is the simple fact of her gender.

This is the best time there has ever been to be a woman with talent, charm and an appetite for advancement.

Nearly all organisations are hungry to have them and none, surely, hungrier than the traumatised IMF.

Given the alleged female- unfriendly circumstances under which Strauss-Kahn crashed out of office, the appointment of a woman to the top job would not merely seem like a triumph for diversity.

It would feel like balm on a large, ugly bruise. – Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2011