Would We Have Had this Crisis If Women Had Been Running the Financial Sector?”

CRESPO, RICARDO F.; VAN STAVEREN, IRENE

Buenos Aires

Congreso; 19th Annual IAFFE Conference on Feminist Economics; 2010

International Associacion for eminist Economics

Ethics of care would have been more effective than the other ethical theories -utilitarianism, deontology- in preventing the last financial crisis. Ethics of care is a feminist ethical theory concerned with relationships. It can be applied to a wide variety of relationships, including market 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 analyze the crisis pointing at what are its causal behavioral attitudes and institutions.