One year ago, BP’s most senior woman left the company. Vivienne Cox was the head of the company’s renewable energy business. A lifelong proponent and pusher of sustainability issues, she was one of the many women to leave the company after the current CEO Tony Hayward took over from Lord Brown, something 20-first.com reported on at the time (see http://www.20-first.com/1007-0-what-is-happening-with-the-women-in-the-oil-and-gas-industry.html). Watching the current debacle and the culture that created it, one wonders had she and the other women stayed, would BP be in its current mess?’

In a public address at Stanford University in 2009, Hayward said that BP had too many people “trying to save the world” – a reference to the ‘Beyond Petroleum’ green vision developed in the John Browne era. They had forgotten, Hayward said, that the company’s “primary purpose was to create value for our shareholders.” In 2010, that purpose has been shattered, after the green vision was. Tragic that the company didn’t see how linked the two subjects have become.

This all has shades of déjà vu. Last year the media questioned if Lehman Brothers had been Lehman Sisters would the outcome have been the same? The investment banking industry is another highly male dominated sector with cultures that are carefully designed and bonuses crafted to encourage – and reward – risky behavior. Today we can ask if BP had kept some of its environmentally leaning female execs on board, would gender balance have proved a safeguard in its risk and environmental management?

Many companies have responded to the crisis by hunkering down on their historical core teams – usually mostly men – that made them successful in the past. They let go of new people and new ideas, losing the innovative thinking that guarantees success in the future. A few companies have instead used the crisis to confirm their commitment to the future, around trends I have called the 3 W’s: Web, Women and Weather:

• WEB: The game-changing technological revolution,
• WOMEN: the massive arrival of women into the same economic roles as men for the first time in human history, and
• WEATHER: the growing imperative of environmental management to protect the planet and (all) its inhabitants from corporate activities.

These are the deeper discontinuities of the 21st century and, as the BP fiasco suggests, they may be more interlinked than we think. The extraordinary technology that allows for deep-sea drilling was so tempting, exciting and profitable that it was launched before adequate safeguards were. The women that worked at BP seemed to be particularly interested in working towards a future that would be ‘Beyond Petroleum’, including the woman who coined the term and the new green logo. They were tossed out or chose to leave as the company’s new CEO hit the crisis and focused back on the company’s traditional ‘core business’ and culture.

These three W’s are interdependent in a myriad of ways. We (and hopefully the other oil companies) now understand how fundamentally the core business of BP is environmental care. The costs of over-focusing on the first ‘W,’ without the complementary perspectives and values that women bring to leadership and profitability, and without sufficient emphasis and investment on the final ‘W’ of Weather, are being painfully played out before our eyes (with the real truth still hidden deep beneath the Gulf).

In 2002, TIME recognized the women who had brought to light the problems at WorldComm and Enron. One of them testified at the time that “I think in some of the higher echelons in corporate America, there is a little bit of an old boys’ club that makes it more difficult for male executives to almost — I don’t want to say rat out a friend, but that’s almost — that is what I want to say.”

That may not just be true in America, but in every sector that resists the gender balance that economic and demographic data is making a natural, meritocratic reality in the business world. The companies that keep women out, that lose most of them in a recession, or that never promote them in the first place, end up being the risk-taking underperformers of tomorrow.

The June edition of the Atlantic Monthly published an article entitled The End of Men, that cites the research linking gender and risk. “Researchers have started looking into the relationship between testosterone and excessive risk, and wondering if groups of men, in some basic hormonal way, spur each other to make reckless decisions. The picture emerging is a mirror image of the traditional gender map: men and markets on the side of the irrational and overemotional, and women on the side of the cool and levelheaded.” (See our reporting on the Young Men, Testosterone and the Financial Mess )

The article goes on to ask “What if the modern, post-industrial economy is simply more congenial to women than to men? … More to the point, what if the economics of the new era are better suited to women? Once you open your eyes to this possibility, the evidence is all around you…”

Perhaps nowhere more clearly than in the Gulf?