The most powerful posts in the financial world are today held by women.  Janet Yellen chairs the Federal Reserve Board, and Christine Lagarde is Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund.  Mary-Jo White heads the Securities and Exchange Commission, and was preceded in that job by Elisse Walter and Mary Schapiro.   And while America’s new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is directed by a man, the reason  is that the industry feared Elizabeth Warren would fill the role too effectively.

But all of these posts are public appointments.  And all of them are paid annual salaries which would insult the bonus expectations of a junior trader.  The best remunerated is the IMF position, which pays around $1/2 million.

In finance, senior jobs in the private sector are taken almost exclusively by men.  There are women in the C suite, to be sure, but mostly as receptionists. A few are to be found  in non-executive roles. Their performance in these functions has not always impressed; Rona Fairhead was recently excoriated by the Public Accounts Committee  for her ineffectiveness as chair of HSBC’s audit and risk committees. At Barclays and at Man Group, Alison Carnwath attracted some the highest votes against the re-election of a non-executive director ever recorded, principally as a result of her inability to contain Bob Diamond’s pay demands when she chaired the bank’s remuneration committee.

No one doubts that Ms Yellen and Mme Lagarde got their demanding jobs on their own merits.  But it is hard to avoid a sense that some of these non executive figures are there to meet a politically correct demand for female appointees rather than for the skills they bring to the board . The term ‘golden skirts’ has been coined to describe the figures who fill Norway’s mandatory quotas for female directors by flitting from boardroom to boardroom.

The most senior woman  executive in global banking is Ana Botin, executive chairman of the Spanish bank Santander.  While Ms Botin has a record of considerable achievement in the financial world, it is not irrelevant that she succeeded to her present position last year on the death of her father.  Birna Einarsdottir, chief executive of Islandsbanki, is one of several women who were sent in to sort out the financial system (and the country itself) when Iceland’s banking system collapsed in 2008.

Women have reached the summit of other boy’s activities – both General Motors and IBM now have female chief executives. What makes banks different?   There may be a clue if we look more widely at the finance sector. A list of the principals of the largest fifty hedge funds contains exactly one female – Sonia Gardner of Avenue Capital (where Chelsea Clinton briefly worked).   There is only one criterion for employing a hedge fund manager – will this person trade profitably? So why so few women?

There have always been two distinct arguments against discrimination on grounds of gender – or anything else. One is simple justice. The other is that women bring genuinely different skills to bear. And perhaps this is the key issue in finance.

The Cambridge neuroscientist John Coates (himself a reformed Wall Street trader) emphasises the link between testosterone and risk taking.  The surges of testosterone and cortisol which he observes as traders are gripped by excitement and depressed by loss are not observed in the same way in women. Thus there is a hormonal explanation of why men are drawn to the risk taking functions in finance while women are engaged in regulating and organising.  We might have better banks if there were rather less male risk taking and rather more female regulating and organising.  Time, perhaps,  for more women  to be employed in executive roles in financial institutions.