Wall Street has for years prided itself on being a “meritocracy,” arguing that its performance-based culture drives capital to the best trading ideas and the best deals. Despite research showing that companies with more diversity, and particularly more women in leadership, offer higher returns on capital, lower risk and greater innovation than firms without such leadership, Wall Street has been, and is, predominantly male at the top. Its trading floors are 90 percent men. This ignores studies indicating that members of homogeneous groups tend to trust one another too much, leading to potential market mispricings.

Homogeneity has led Wall Street firms to travel in packs, going after the same opportunities at the same time: junk bonds in the 1980s, tech stocks in the late 1990s and subprime lending in the run-up to the crash 10 years ago. In particular, when the subprime bet proved wrong, the big banks went essentially bankrupt and were bailed out by the United States government because officials worried that the economic cost of their failure would have been catastrophic.

Thus one can draw a line from the gender discrimination on Wall Street through to the lack of women — and lack of diversity of thought — in the industry to increased risk and to the financial crisis.

Silicon Valley today is rife with parallels to Wall Street, its lessons unlearned. Like Wall Street, it prides itself on its meritocratic culture, arguing that its performance-based orientation will drive capital to the best start-ups. There are few senior women at the top venture capital firms. The industry funds few start-ups run by women. Last year, of the approximately $60 billion that venture capital firms invested, just $1.5 billion went to businesses with female founders.

One might argue that start-ups run by men just happen to deliver the highest possible returns. The mythology around the industry bolsters this, with venture capitalists boasting of investing in Facebook practically out of the dorm room.

But that argument doesn’t hold up. Investors in venture capital funds would have been as well off simply investing in the stock market over the past five to 15 years. That’s what I see in reviewing the data from the research firm Cambridge Associates: Investors in the high-risk, high-reward world of start-ups essentially did no better than they could have opening an account at their neighborhood brokerage. What might help those venture capitalists? First Round Capital reports that its investments in companies with a female founder have posted 63 percent better returns than men-only firms.

Venture capital and Wall Street are both funded by “other people’s money.” Pension funds, endowments, mutual funds and individual investors provide the fuel that enables this sexist, exclusionary behavior. The irony is that so many of these endowments and foundations exist to make the world a fairer place, not to exclude vast segments of the population. Yet because their money is tied up in industries where women’s perspectives, and diversity of viewpoints, aren’t valued on the whole, their causes — and their bottom lines — lose out.