Paul Tudor Jones, the billionaire founder of Tudor Investment, said there will “never see as many great women investors or traders as men—period, end of story.”
It’s not that women aren’t capable, Jones said in April at a University of Virginia panel discussion in front of students, “they are very capable,” but babies are a “killer” to a trader’s focus.
Jones posited that having children hurts the success of women just as traumatic emotional events, like divorce, affect male traders.
“As soon as that baby’s lips touched that girl’s bosom, forget it,” Jones said, recalling two women who worked with him in the late 1970s. “They both got married,” he said, “and then they both had—which in my mind is as big of a killer as divorce is—they both had children.”
The billionaire who tops the Forbes 400 list at number 108 said men aren’t affected by their children in this way.
“Every desire to understand what is going to make this go up or go down is going to be overwhelmed by the most beautiful experience,” he said, “which a man will never share, about a mode of connection between that mother and that baby.”
A video of a panel discussion obtained by The Washington Post through a Freedom of Information Act request.
“The emotional distraction that comes from divorce is so overwhelming,” he said. “You can just automatically subtract 10- to 20% from any manager if he is going through a divorce.”
Jones responded to the newspaper, saying “my off-the-cuff remarks at the University of Virginia were with regard to global macro traders, who are on-call 24/7 and of whom there are likely only a few thousand successful practitioners in the world today. Macro trading requires a high degree of skill, focus and repetition. Life events, such as birth, divorce, death of a loved one and other emotional highs and lows are obstacles to success in this specific field of finance.”
The Morning Joe panel discussed the comments with a panel of powerful women. Watch below.
Jane Timm