Saw this at Bloomberg and thought it worth a brief mention:

As they struggle to achieve parity with their male counterparts, women at the highest levels of Wall Street are catching up in one category — losing their jobs.

That might not actually be the type of equality that many women were searching for.

However, it is of course possible to take a more positive view of this. As you regular readers will know, I’ve got a background in economics and I’m very much one of those free market sorta guys. One thing that many over look (or choose to ignore) is that markets themselves are entirely amoral. The people within them might be immoral or moral, but the market exchange system itself is entirely amoral. It doesn’t care about your sex, gender, sexual preferences, color, place of birth or religion. It cares only about what you’ve got to offer and what you want in return for it.

There are some who aren’t all that convinced, who think that cultural attitudes still play too large a part:

There might be more women in such lofty positions if attitudes toward women on Wall Street changed, said Linda Bialecki, president of Bialecki Inc., a New York-based boutique executive search firm.

“Stereotypes embedded in our society are so pervasive, so accepted by men and women that it’s truly extraordinarily difficult to move beyond them,” Bialecki said. “As a definition of leadership, men can be assertive, aggressive and decisive. Those are not words that are positively ascribed to women.”

But the reality is that:

The market, as everyone has discovered, takes no prisoners

And that’s a good thing, for just as it doesn’t discriminate between hte sexes or races on the way down, when people are getting fired, not does it on the way up, when people are getting hired.

The people in the markets might discriminate, but the markets themselves do not.