Lawyers, Gender, and Money: Consensus, Closure, and Conflict in the Global Financial Crisis

Abstract

How did the interplay of intellectual overconfidence, gender, and professional socialization limit economic policy debate over the subprime boom and global financial crisis? In this article, I integrate historical institutionalist and feminist institutionalist insights to make sense of the interplay of gender and professional socialization in limiting the scope for precrisis regulation and postcrisis reform. First, drawing on historical institutionalist perspectives, I highlight the scope for inefficiency in the use of information, arguing that policy success over time can engender tendencies to misplace confidence and intellectual closure. Secondly, drawing on feminist institutionalist perspectives, I stress the role of professional and gender socialization in enabling agents to resist such inefficiencies and so limit the scope for intellectual closure. In empirical terms, I then advance three case studies addressing the roles of Commodity Futures Trading Commission Chair Brooksley Born, Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation Chair Sheila Bair, and Troubled Asset Relief Program Congressional Oversight Panel Chair Elizabeth Warren in challenging the precrisis deregulatory consensus. In the conclusion, I address theoretical and policy implications, stressing the social dynamics that may spur women toward increased professional and intellectual risk taking.

Introduction: situating gender scholarship in IPE

“…The rise of constructivist IPE has created certain dilemmas for feminist IPE scholars -the emergence of a field of study emphasizing the social construction of intersubjective identities in global politics would appear at face value to be a field in which feminist perspectives are welcomed. And yet, constructivist IPE and feminist IPE have largely emerged as distinct traditions (with a couple of notable exceptions: Locher and Prügl 2001;Widmaier 2015). Çaǧlar suggests that although some feminist IPE scholarship is profoundly materialist in orientation, a feminist constructivism underpins a great deal of recent work on how we understand relations of production/ reproduction and also how we understand global governance.…”