Would we have had this crisis if women had been running the financial sector?

Abstract

The two main ethical approaches, utilitarianism and deontology, have not been able to prevent some of the behaviours underlying the financial crisis. A third ethics, the ethics of care, might have been more effective than the other two in preventing the last financial crisis. The ethics of care is a feminist ethical theory concerned with relationships. It can be applied to a wide variety of relationships and has been tested in experimental settings, suggesting that women tend to behave more in ways that can be understood in terms of relationships, whereas men tend to behave more in terms of rules. Using these ethical theories, we analyse the crisis pointing at what are its causal behavioural attitudes and institutions.