A sexy wiggle means you fumble figures, and other nonsense

'ARE YOU pretty enough to cheat?" Answer "yes" and you are: a) up-to-date on the latest nature/nurture argument b) an aspiring academic desperate for media coverage or c) Angelina Jolie.

Answer b), then you might be University of Texas PhD candidate Kristina Durante, who recently made international headlines with her thesis that good-looking women have higher than normal levels of oestradiol, a fertility hormone she claims leads them to flirt and consider infidelity to "trade up" partners.

Coincidentally, a study on male hormones released about the same time claimed the most successful male financial traders in London had longer ring fingers, a sign of exposure to high levels of testosterone in the womb.

So, do our hormones control the way we act? Since Richard Dawkins set science on its head with his book The Selfish Gene, the weight of opinion has been gradually building that it is nature, rather than nurture, that determines who we are.

But there seems to be a whiff of sexual stereotyping in the air. The male hormone testosterone helps you beat the sharemarket to make you a Master of the Universe.

Oestrogen, on the other hand won't help you navigate the global financial crisis - but why worry your pretty little head about that, when it will give you bigger boobs, lips like Angelina Jolie's and a wiggle like Marilyn Monroe to help snag yourself a "high-status" partner (presumably with long ring finger).

Durante's study would seem to be the sort of sexed-up research-lite that would have us believe women are ruled by moral-free hormones in our panic to become embedded with the best possible seed. In an inspired pairing of science with tabloid gossip, Durante told one US media outlet, "We found someone like Angelina Jolie ... is more willing to be acquainted with another partner if someone better comes along."

My immediate reaction to this is: a) this is no big newsflash for Brad Pitt's former wife, Jennifer Aniston b) Brad Pitt should watch out for Barack Obama and c) how kind of Jolie to share her oestradiol levels with the University of Texas.

Not that the blatant manufacturing of a sexy media angle is the only problem. Melbourne University reproductive and evolutionary biologist Roger Short has said the study, which tracked the sexual feelings and hormone levels of 52 young American undergraduate students over a single month lacked hard data linking beauty with fertility.

But others were more eager to jump onto Durante's free-publicity bus. Frances Quirk, head of James Cook University's psychology department - and seeming authority on Marilyn Monroe - was only too happy to share her knowledge with the media: "She (Monroe) was a classic hour-glass figure. Her relationships lasted three or four years and if you look at the men, they increased in status."

Women with high levels of oestradiol, she opined, "may also be the sort of women that other women don't like too much".

Meanwhile, flipping the bird was being given a makeover in the finance world, thanks to a University of Cambridge study research fellow John Coates, who studied the index-to-ring finger ratio, a measure used in athletes, of 44 London traders involved in intense, fast-moving trades to find these chaps predominantly had jolly long ring fingers.

This, he argued, was due to testosterone and was the reason they had faster reaction times than other traders and were also more decisive. The editor of one online forum summed up the story this way: "Why women and old men can't trade."

While Dr Coates' numbers sound a little thin, bear in mind that there are presumably even fewer traders to study today. In fact, looking around at the current state of global financial systems, you have to wonder what the effect all this pumping testosterone really has been.

Outlandishly long ring fingers certainly didn't help the likes of failed investment houses Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns.

But I digress. Thanks to Dr Coates' research, will stock exchanges around the world now be lining up their traders with a ruler before the morning's trading bell sounds?

Before I am accused of being a dinosaur in the nature-or-nurture debate - or more tediously, of political correctness - I fully accept the idea that nature accounts for far more of our behaviour than we previously believed. Still there is something troubling about studies that peddle preposterous ideas about women or conveniently suggest a "scientific" explanation for why men are ideally biologically suited

to high-status, highly paid positions.

Dr Coates carried out his research on a floor that employed 200 traders - all but three were male. So I guess a study on how oestradiol affects financial trading simply isn't going to be possible.

Maybe there are so few women because it is an environment that tends to exclude those who are not like them. This probably doesn't matter if you are Angelina Jolie. But let's face it, most of us aren't.

Helen Westerman is an Age journalist.