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To argue this case, you would probably need more than just behavioural evidence; you might need to understand some of the mechanisms which produced the trillion-dollar bad decision-making that led to what happened in 2008. In recent years, and particularly since the crash, a new science of such decision-making – neuroeconomics – has become fashionable in universities and beyond. It proposes the idea that you will create a better understanding of how people make economic choices if you bring to bear advances in neurobiology and brain chemistry and behavioural psychology alongside traditional economic maths models. Not surprisingly, neuroeconomics has plenty to say about the question of whether decision-making, in high-pressure situations, divides on gender lines.

The problem is that most scenarios will be used to investigate this gap artificially. It's one thing to someone installing an MRI scanner and told him that a million pounds for the decision rests in a game, it's another when that person is actually one million pounds to lose. Only one study, as far as I could learn, had access to brain chemistry, neurobiology, the young men are actually working on the trading floor. But the results it produced were still surprising.

The study was led by a pair of Cambridge researcher. One, Joe Herbert, professor of endocrinology, and the other, John Coates, a researcher in neuroscience and finance. Herbert, a specialist on the effects of hormones on depression, was fascinated to implement some of his theories on the role of chemicals on the decision-making in practice. The strange thing about banks, he said to me, "was that they all know about computers and systems and markets, but they know almost nothing about the man-machine sitting in the chair in front of screens to make decisions. Nothing. We wanted to correct the only slightly. "

It was Coates, though, who made the experiment possible. Having met Herbert at his lab in Cambridge, I met Coates in a pub in west London. He had a special advantage in gaining access to bond traders' brains, he explained: he used to possess one himself. Sharp-eyed and fit-looking, Coates retains the intensity of a man who used to run a trading desk on Wall Street during the dotcom bubble. He started off at Goldman Sachs and went on to Deutsche Bank. After some years trading, and making a lot of money out of a lot of money, he became increasingly fascinated by the way, during the dotcom years, the traders he worked alongside radically changed behaviour. They became, he says, "euphoric and delusional. They were taking far more risks, and were putting up trades with terrible risk-reward profiles". The dotcom was fun, in a way, he suggests; it was like the roaring 20s. "But I don't think anyone looks back on the housing bubble and laughs."

Coates was a relatively cautious traders themselves, but there were times when he felt this increase was the euphoria: "When I had what a lot of money to me, I felt incredibly strong," he recalls. '. T help, Michael Lewis spoke of' \ swaggering "You are to carry yourself like a rooster, and \ can be Big Swinging Dicks ', spoke about Tom Wolfe' Masters of the Universe '- they were right a dealer . acts exactly on a winning series so \. "

The second thing that Coates noticed was even more revelatory to him. "I noticed that women did not buy into the dotcom bubble at all," he says. "You couldn't find one who did, hardly. And that seemed like a pretty cool fact to me."

With this cool fact in mind, Coates began splitting his time between his trading desk and the Rockefeller University in Manhattan, which is perhaps \ the world's leading institute for the study of chemicals in the brain. There he became interested steroids, in particular so-called "the winner effect". This happens when two males get a competitive and their testosterone levels, increases muscle mass and the ability of blood to give to transport oxygen. It increases their risk appetite. Much of this testosterone remains in the system, the winner of a competition while the loser 's testosterone melts quickly, in evolutionary terms, the loser moves into the forest, to lick his wounds. In the next round of competition, but the winner already has a high level of testosterone, he starts with an advantage, and this continues to reinforce itself.

"Steroids," says Coates, "as most chemicals show in your body, what an inverted U-shaped curve called." This means that if you have a low lack you have vitality, and do very bad mental and physical tasks. But since the values ??you get sharper and more focused, until you reach an optimum. Most importantly: \ win "If you, your testosterone level goes past that peak and sliding on the other hand, you start doing stupid things that happen in the animals, they go into the open too much ... take too many fights you neglect parenting duties and they patrol areas that are too large "In short, they like to behave dealers on a roll ... it cocky.

To most experienced, male, investment bankers, of course, this sounds like fighting talk. An old friend of mine, who traded his Cambridge English degree for an extremely lucrative life as a bond dealer, offered this, when I presented Coates's evidence to him. "It would be nice to think that having more female traders on the floor would make for less volatility," he said, "but that's wishful thinking. Financial markets are now global, so while we in the west might decide not to chase trends or react instinctively to breaking news because there are mature mothering types in boardrooms and sitting on risk committees, the rest of the world will, and our banks would lose out." And that's not all. "Many of the women I know who have managed money or have put capital at risk for banks have tended to be even more aggressive with risk than their male counterparts, as if perhaps to compensate for their supposed diffidence. Fighting their way through a male-dominated environment to a position in which they can invest/punt/ risk-manage, many women develop an ultra-masculine persona so as to be thought of as ballsy…"

The country that has attempted most radically to change this balance is Norway, where a Conservative minister imposed a quota of 40% female directors in every boardroom. Most of the data suggests the initiative has been a great success, both culturally and commercially (though some, male, commentators argue that the turnaround is better explained by the spike in oil prices).

? If groups of young men are shown pornographic pictures of women and then asked to choose between safe and risky investments, compared with men shown non-pornographic pictures they choose far riskier portfolios.