After the initial rush of outrage from (mostly) women across the Internet, a wave of responses emerged that I find deeply encouraging. First, it is apparently well established that female traders actually do better than men over the longer term. After the Tudor Jones comments surfaced, I discovered a terrific piece from a year ago by John Coates, senior researcher in neuroscience and finance at the University of Cambridge, former investment banker, and author of The Hour between Dog and Wolf : Risk Taking, Gut Feelings, and the Biology of Boom and Bust. His article cited a number of studies that show women out-performing men as both traders and asset managers, even though women are supposedly more risk-averse.

Drilling down on this data, Coates finds that men and women are equally willing to take risks. Men like to take them quickly, thrilling to the rapid-fire pace of the trading floor (think modern-day battlefield), whereas women prefer to take more time to analyze a security and then make the trade. Coates identifies three traits of a successful risk taker: "a good call on the market, a healthy appetite for risk and quick reactions." He explains that with the rise of "execution only" trading, in which the client does the analysis and looks to the trader only to execute the trade, computers are replacing traders. Thus we can now value risk-takers in terms of "their call on the market and their understanding of risk once they put on a trade; and there is no reason to believe men are better at this than women. Importantly, the financial world desperately needs more long-term, strategic thinking, and the data indicate that women excel at this."

Coates' conclusions are particularly interesting if we recall that Tudor Jones is not just emphasizing focus per se; he's talking about a kind of focus that allows a trader to be "hyper-rational," immune from emotional turbulence of any kind. That's why he equates "women with babies" with "men going through a divorce," whom he says will automatically reduce their trading results by 10 to 20 percent. Similarly, with respect to women, "The idea that you could think straight for 60 seconds and be able to make a rational decision is impossible, particularly when their kids are involved." Tudor Jones wants to rule out any kind of emotion that might separate a human being from a machine, that would deviate from the perfectly rational creature we know as homo economicus. But now that we actually have machines that can be more "rational" than any human being, the only value that humans bring, other than their ability to program the machines, is the things that machines can't do.

So what are those things? Empathy, for one, a quality that more and more studies are emphasizing as essential for effective leadership and management. As one of my Twitter interlocutors commented, "If traders had such demonstrable empathy, they would not have been able to bring us the Great Recession." Another distinctively human trait is to think "out of the box," beyond a programmed response, to challenge group-think. Another Twitter correspondent noted that Jones is describing "less focus than close-minded buy-in to [the] system," the kind of close-mindedness that "led to the financial crisis."