Lucy Kellaway, writing in the FT, described the toxic male environment she experienced on an FX trading floor early in her career. 4 Though many men were (and are) equally  1  https://www.globalfxc.org/membership.htm https://www.globalfxc.org/global_index.htm https://www.ft.com/content/62001b10-90de-11e8-9609-3d3b945e78cf 4 https://www.ft.com/content/511ad09e-6be2-11e4-b939-00144feabdc0 2 3  2  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/publications/Pages/speeches/default.aspx  2  disgusted by such behaviour, it is unlikely to have been helped by the gender balance in the market. The 2016 Gadhia review5 showed that, whilst women actually outnumbered men 60/40 in financial services as a whole, they were much less likely to be the managers or leaders who shaped the culture (Figure 1). And even when they were leaders, they were three times more likely to be running HR, communications or other support functions than serving in C-suite positions (Figure 2). Figure 1: Average representation of women in Financial Services in 20 global markets  Figure 2: Proportion of Executive Committee functions held by women  5  https://uk.virginmoney.com/virgin/assets/pdf/Virgin-Money-Empowering-Productivity-Report.pdf 3  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/publications/Pages/speeches/default.aspx  3  Diversity is good for the bottom line  Disparities of this kind are unfair. They also make terrible business sense. Diversity improves financial performance: across the economy as a whole, firms with top-quartile executive-level diversity are 20-30% more likely to outperform their peers (Figure 3). And diversity reduces risk.
The major uncertainty, of course, relates to the situation in the United States - the world's largest economy - which had experienced a period of exceptionally strong economic growth with relatively low inflation until the latter part of last year, which itself played a vital part in buoying up the whole world economy through the Asian financial crisis. Briefly - and no doubt oversimply - this very strong performance was made possible by developments on the supply side of the US economy in the form of exceptional productivity gains, as the application of new information and communications technologies spread through the economy. This development - though extremely difficult to quantify promised a higher sustainable rate of growth in the US economy and higher corporate earnings growth. That expectation in turn contributed to a rapid rise in equity prices, especially in the "high tech" sectors, which helped stimulate both business investment in the US and consumer demand causing the private sector to move into financial deficit. It also attracted massive direct and portfolio investment inflows from abroad which over-financed an increasing current account deficit in the US and caused the dollar to strengthen against other currencies. But by the first half of last year the US economy was expanding at a rate of around 5%, which even on the most optimistic view of underlying productivity growth was clearly unsustainable.