> Though David Rowe, a veteran architect of the Wharton forecasting model, has played a key role in developing the firm's econometric model, the senior staff, including Miss Eickhoff, Judith Mackey and Lucille Wu, is mostly female. Mr. Greenspan explains the gender bias with the free-market pragmatism that has become his hallmark: "I always valued men and women equally, and I found that because others did not, good women economists were cheaper than men. Hiring women does two things: It gives us better quality work for less money, and it raises the market value of women."

That is, just a few decades ago, the leading economic consulting firms in the world—economists!—were regularly overpaying men because they didn't want to hire equally capable women, such that Greenspan could find an obvious mispricing in the labor market.

Imagine how much more poorly people who are not economists and not owners of their firm must be making hiring decisions on much less blatant biases than gender.