Are Women Less Greedy than Men?

It is hard to know whether to be more ashamed of, or terrified by, the amoral world of utterly selfish recklessness inhabited by the former senior bankers at the now defunct Anglo Irish Bank, as revealed by the telephone conversations recorded there in the weeks before and after the 2008 Irish banking crash.

These men, with their eye-watering salaries and bonuses, appear to inhabit a word devoid of moral compass, where governments were tricked into bankrupting themselves and whole countries placed in hock for generations, because of the bizarrely selfish and allegedly sociopathic behaviour of these men? How can such utterly blinkered selfishness by very privileged, very well-heeled and educated citizens come about?

It wasn’t a uniquely Irish problem as we have seen comparable examples in London and New York, from manipulation of the Libor rate to the selling of worthless mortgage-backed securities based on drug-pusher-type selling of huge mortgages to poor families in the USA who never had any chance of paying them back.

Is it a coincidence that it is nearly always male names which pop up, scandal after scandal? Is this not simply because relatively fewer women reach the senior levels in financial insitutions where they have the discretion to destroy national economies with their reckless and feckless gambling? Perhaps not.

Women have approximately half the risk of becoming addicted to drugs than men and they are also much less likely to suffer another type of equally-devastating addiction – compulsive gambling.

It may seem strange to consider gambling an addiction similar to heroin or cocaine addiction, but it is. It is because money can have drug-like properties and acts in similar ways to drugs, namely by hijacking the brain’s only ‘feel good’ system, known as the ‘reward network’.

Everyone knows the destructive effect on morals, responsibilities, priorities and personality which addiction to heroin, alcohol and other drugs cause. Every one of us can think of a decent person whose personality seems to disintegrate under the power of addiction. Exactly this sort of thing happens in compulsive gambling also.

It happens because high-risk gambling over-stimulates the brain’s reward network in the same way that cocaine or heroin do, triggering appetites which can never be satisfied. This leads to the phenomenon of needing higher and higher doses to achieve the same feel-good effect – this is known as ‘tolerance’.

For whatever reason, women seem less likely to succumb in this way – their appetites for these drug- or money-induced ‘highs’ seem to be lower than men’s, on average at least.

Could it be that women are less ‘greedy’ than men? By greedy I mean seeking that small number of things which seem to be able to ‘mainline’ powerfully into our brain’s reward network: drugs, sex, money and power.

Greed means seeking the pure surge of pleasure, untempered by more complex satisfactions: for instance, guzzling down the desert rather than savouring its taste or heading for the quick sexual orgasmic release over the more subtle sexual pleasures leading to climax. It also means tipping back the wine for its feel-good effect unmitigated by slow savouring of its flavor. - Or hungering for the money irrespective of the professional satisfaction of doing the job well or delivering a good service.

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I am not saying that the bankers and financiers who have so diminished us are all compulsive gamblers. But they are men whose appetites for money have been over-stimulated by immorally-high bonuses and salaries and this has led to a personality-distorting greed which scrambled any judgment and morals which they may have had.

Drivers of expensive cars are more likely to drive past pedestrians waiting to cross at pedestrian crossings and wealthy people who believe that greed is a good thing are much more likely to say that they would cheat and behave unethically and feel themselves above the rules which govern the common man.

My hunch is that men are greedier than women, and that is based on wide reading about women’s behaviour in relation to at least three of these domains – sex, drugs and money. And that means women do a lot fewer very bad things in the world than men – including bankrupting countries with their personality-, morals- and judgment-destroying greed.

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