Last week, after France had crashed out of the World Cup and England's performance was too painful to watch, I was sent an e-mail by a firm of management consultants. What was going wrong, it said, was that the teams' managers were acting just like men. If only they had behaved more like women and been consensual and caring, they might have persuaded their players to kick the ball into the back of the net rather more often.

Footballing mishaps are the latest in a series of catastrophes to be blamed on a surfeit of maleness. When Lehman Brothers went bust, lots of people said that if it had been Lehman Sisters things might have turned out differently. The same point is now being made about BP: if women had been in charge, safety might have been a bigger priority and the planet might have been cared for rather better.

Much of this is total twaddle, especially for football and banking. At BP the female touch would not have saved the day either, but it might have ensured it was not lost quite so disastrously.