This week, I’ve been researching CEO compensation at a bunch of financial institutions that crumbled recently. Aside from the riches these guys raked in, I also noticed there were no women leaders to be found among the financial rubble. (My story on CEO pay came out today on MSNBC.com.)

OK, it’s not so surprising since women still make up less than 20 percent of the corner office jobs in Corporate America. But it struck me — what if there were indeed more women in the top seats or in board rooms at companies like Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, Wachovia, Washington Mutual, Countrywide, Bear Stearns, Freddie Mac, Fannie Mae, and AIG?

Would these companies have imploded the way they did — where CEOs and top executives bet the farm on risky subprime mortgages — if there were more women in the ivory towers?

I think this is a fair question to ask. Often times we hear about how women are more risk adverse than men. And a Catalyst study last year found that firms with lots of women board members did better than those without.

Fortune 500 companies with the highest representation of women board directors attained significantly higher financial performance, on average, than those with the lowest representation of women board directors, according to Catalyst’s most recent report, The Bottom Line: Corporate Performance and Women’s Representation on Boards. In addition, the report points out, on average, notably stronger-than-average performance at companies with three or more women board directors.

Claudia Morrell, an advocate for women in business and the head of MDWIT, a nonprofit that promotes entry and advancement for women in technology, points out that women entrepreneurs tend to be more cautious when it comes to money, asking for loans only in amounts they need to run a business and they are also better at paying those loans off.

“Women are a little bit more cautious in terms of business growth and don’t jump quite as quickly so their businesses tend to be stronger,” she explains.

So, do we need a bit more level-headedness at our nation’s corporations? Sometimes it’s hard to be level headed when you’re in a sea of people who think and look like you.

Many of the compensation experts I’ve been talking to point to entrenched boards filled with old white men overseeing typically all-white male management teams, as a possible reason no one had sense enough to question stupid business moves during the housing explosion or the ridiculous CEO payouts that followed, and continued even though these companies were nosediving.

Maybe some women find comfort in the fact that there were no women at the helm of these firms because now we can feel smug about how we could have done better. But that’s a dumb and short-sighted attitude.

We all need to be kicking ourselves, men and women, that there wasn’t more diversity at the top even if there was only the slightest chance that things could have gone differently.