In discussions about more women on boards there are two competing arguments in favour. One is that able women have just as much right to be there as their male counterparts; the other, that companies would be better run if they had more influential women. During the banking crisis, Ruth Sutherland in this paper argued that if there had been more females around, they might have cooled the white-hot testosterone-fuelled risk taking; but banking women I know disagreed: "By the time they get there, women are just the same." It's certainly unfair if a woman's passed over for a less able man, but many a man's been passed over that way, too. The more compelling argument has to be that women may be shrewd in a different way from men, so the outfit will lose out if it only has a one-sided view. Yet at a recent meeting by the women's group Forum UK on bankers and ethics, one woman denounced as discriminatory the idea that we bring anything special to the table, as if the rules of commerce as played were the only gold standard – that strikes me as absurd. One thing we do bring anyway, as the academic Deborah Tannen said, is that men hate asking questions so when we ask, the faces of males who didn't understand either clear all round the table.