Just as the theory has been floated that President Trump might have leaked his 2005 tax returns to deflect the country’s attention from the potential evisceration of the Affordable Care Act, it is worth considering the timing of State Street’s clarion call. In January, following an inquiry by the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Boston field office, the Justice Department announced that State Street Corporation, the parent company of State Street Global Advisors, had entered into a deferred prosecution agreement with the government, consenting to pay more than $64 million to resolve fraud charges.

State Street had fleeced its clients, prosecutors maintained, by secretly billing for unwarranted commissions and, as a result, had abused their trust and caused them to lose substantial amounts of money. A spokeswoman for the company, Anne McNally, dismissed any connection between the action and State Street’s broad diversity agenda, pointing out that the government’s inquiries began seven years ago.

Could all of this ugliness have been prevented if State Street, and so many other companies like it, simply had more women on their boards? State Street Corporation currently has three among its 11 board members, a 27 percent representation rate, which is higher than the average for Fortune 500 companies. The third woman joined just last year, after the F.B.I. investigation was already in progress. To believe that women can provide a certain kind of salvation in this sense — to speculate that we might have avoided the 2008 financial crisis entirely if only for a little more Girl Power — requires its own brand of sexism: the belief that women just don’t have what it takes to be as greedy as men. Only someone with no exposure to the “Real Housewives” franchise could legitimately hold this view.

It is a high moment for gestural feminism, from the vapid Sheryl Sandberg-isms of Ivanka Trump (“Never settle,” she says — who has to with a staff?) to the proliferation of pink hats from the West Side of Manhattan to the Los Angeles Westside. Tourists have been flocking to take pictures of “Fearless Girl.” On a recent frigid evening, with 30 people or so surrounding the statue and vying for the right shot, I met a mother from Texas who had cut short the time she spent in the Sept. 11 museum in order to bring her four daughters to catch a glimpse of “Fearless Girl” before it got too dark. Even the New York City public advocate, Letitia James, who is generally more concerned with the struggles of the have-nots than the have-Harvard-M.B.A.s, has made time to join the throngs now calling for “Fearless Girl” to remain at her current location permanently.