A man named Paul Tudor Jones, a gadzillionaire hedge fund manager, in a forum of other mega-rich men round-tabling on the campus of a major university, took a question from the audience not long ago, from a woman who wondered why all the panelists were silver-haired gents – and why there were no such women.
Pity poor, rich Mr. Jones. He tried to give the best answer he knew, but he could not for the life of him reverse the direction of that foot he’d placed so eagerly in his mouth.
Because women have babies, he said; and once women hold those darling newborns to their “bosoms” [his word], those women lose their sharpness, a sharpness prerequisite to hedge fund management. Women are, by nature, wired to love the little ones they bring into the world. They’re lost to the trade because those babies disorient the laser-like commitments required to make really, really big money.
He may be right. I’ve always believed female perception differs from male perception, always felt gender differences to be as mysterious as they are real. But there’s something terribly offensive about what Mr. Jones said and how he said it, something that snorts like a pig of the male chauvinist kind.
He’s stereotyping women, of course, and slighting both sexes – isn’t a man different too once he becomes a father? What’s more, the sexism inherent in the answer he gave suggests exactly why there aren’t more women hedge-fund fat cats? – attitudes like Mr. Jones' are all too brashly trumpeted.
But there’s more. In the broadest sense, the equation he created with his answer goes like this: one can choose to love money or children. If you want to be me up here around this fancy table, he might have said, you got to love money, with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. And, oh yeah, to heck with the neighbors.
I once knew a man so committed to being a novelist that he told others, including his wife, that nothing – absolutely nothing – would stand in his way. He wrote novels all right – more than twenty; but when he died, he died alone. If you want to read those novels, you can still get some of them, used, from Amazon. They’re out of print.
Was he a better novelist for committing the way he did to his craft? Can someone be a great mathematician if her motivation isn’t fever-pitched? When eight-year-old gymnasts show the kind of natural talent only Olympians have, they’re quickly escorted into worlds different from anything their third-grade classmates will ever know. Is there any other way to be a champion than to give everything?
He may be right.
At eighty years old, burdened with health problems, subject to taxing exhaustion of constant travel, surrounded always by admirers and yet somehow bereft of the love of Christ Jesus, Mother Teresa still rose daily at 4:40 in the morning just to be among the very first into the chapel for morning prayers. Her commitment was total, even when her spirit faltered.
No one could have given more. No one so entirely gave herself away. No one’s commitment was so iron-clad.
But then, she was convinced that she saw in the minds and eyes and hearts of the poor nothing less than her Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. He may not have been in her heart – at least that’s the darkness she often carried; but he was always there in the visage of the powerless, the dying, the emaciated face of the poor.
She might have made one of America’s finest hedge fund managers, but thank the Lord that with indefatigable commitment to smile, to love, to feed, and to clothe, she choose something vastly different than making big money.
She was, without a doubt, a champion of faith.
Because women have babies, he said; and once women hold those darling newborns to their “bosoms” [his word], those women lose their sharpness, a sharpness prerequisite to hedge fund management. Women are, by nature, wired to love the little ones they bring into the world. They’re lost to the trade because those babies disorient the laser-like commitments required to make really, really big money.
He may be right. I’ve always believed female perception differs from male perception, always felt gender differences to be as mysterious as they are real. But there’s something terribly offensive about what Mr. Jones said and how he said it, something that snorts like a pig of the male chauvinist kind.
He’s stereotyping women, of course, and slighting both sexes – isn’t a man different too once he becomes a father? What’s more, the sexism inherent in the answer he gave suggests exactly why there aren’t more women hedge-fund fat cats? – attitudes like Mr. Jones' are all too brashly trumpeted.
But there’s more. In the broadest sense, the equation he created with his answer goes like this: one can choose to love money or children. If you want to be me up here around this fancy table, he might have said, you got to love money, with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. And, oh yeah, to heck with the neighbors.
I once knew a man so committed to being a novelist that he told others, including his wife, that nothing – absolutely nothing – would stand in his way. He wrote novels all right – more than twenty; but when he died, he died alone. If you want to read those novels, you can still get some of them, used, from Amazon. They’re out of print.
Was he a better novelist for committing the way he did to his craft? Can someone be a great mathematician if her motivation isn’t fever-pitched? When eight-year-old gymnasts show the kind of natural talent only Olympians have, they’re quickly escorted into worlds different from anything their third-grade classmates will ever know. Is there any other way to be a champion than to give everything?
He may be right.
At eighty years old, burdened with health problems, subject to taxing exhaustion of constant travel, surrounded always by admirers and yet somehow bereft of the love of Christ Jesus, Mother Teresa still rose daily at 4:40 in the morning just to be among the very first into the chapel for morning prayers. Her commitment was total, even when her spirit faltered.
No one could have given more. No one so entirely gave herself away. No one’s commitment was so iron-clad.
But then, she was convinced that she saw in the minds and eyes and hearts of the poor nothing less than her Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. He may not have been in her heart – at least that’s the darkness she often carried; but he was always there in the visage of the powerless, the dying, the emaciated face of the poor.
She might have made one of America’s finest hedge fund managers, but thank the Lord that with indefatigable commitment to smile, to love, to feed, and to clothe, she choose something vastly different than making big money.
She was, without a doubt, a champion of faith.
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