For nearly eight years, she has been on the board of AMP and two years ago was appointed as chair. If her board career (now including Coca-Cola Amatil and Boral) survives the horrifying revelations of AMP's treatment of its customers, it will be as miraculous as a resurrection of Tony Abbott and I don't believe in miracles.

What's a golden skirt?

First coined by Norwegian academic Morten Huse in 2011 to describe the phenomenon of the small number of women on corporate boards, it now has a faintly pejorative connotation, a way of demeaning the contribution of the women while acknowledging that corporate boards at least must pretend to be diverse. Thing is, those women are in short supply at a time when boards need to be more diverse rather than less.

This is no defence of Brenner. She should have resigned last week.

But we don't need to have women on boards because they are nicer or kinder or more ethical. We must have diverse boards to have diverse thinking – and Marian Baird, the University of Sydney's professor of gender and employment relations says the research makes it plain.

"Women make better decisions and don't go along with the leader ... they don't follow the loudest voices because there is more questioning."

So what of the AMP Board when Brenner goes? How does the composition look?

There are four women now, including Brenner, and two of those, Vanessa Wallace and Holly Kramer are up for re-election at AMP's annual general meeting on May 10. There is also one man up for re-election.

So your automatic response would be to say, let's get rid of all of them, right? In fact, sack them all.

That is, strangely, not the response of the Australian Shareholders' Association, which has decided to vote for the removal of Wallace and Kramer but has an "undecided" against Andrew Harmos. The ASA's Allan Goldin tells me the logic is Harmos has only been there five minutes, in comparison to the two women who have each been on the board for two years. Harmos's five minutes (or nearly a year) on the main AMP board is accompanied by his directorship of AMP Life for five years. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

Voting against those two women and not against Harmos succumbs to the kind of thinking that there are bad apples, that small amounts of surgery will fix the problem, when the only cure is the death of capitalism.

And since that's unlikely to happen very soon, let's go for a deep cleanse of toxic capitalism as it is enacted by our major banks and insurance companies.

The Australian reported early this week that the Business Council of Australia's Jennifer Westacott told the Senate's economics references committee "disclosures aired in the royal commission were 'deeply disappointing', and called for swift and decisive action against banking figures who were responsible".

I reckon that's a pretty good idea really. And when Westacott says banking figures, I'm sure she understands it's more than bad apples, it's the system. And the system is continuing to rip off customers. It's the system and all who sail in it which continues to drip feed remediation to customers or don't even bother to tell customers when they have been defrauded.

Instead, we see an extraordinary battle for control between the executives with their insane salaries and bonuses and those who need funding to cure the problem, between the rich guys and the good guys (or those who at least understand that customers who've been cheated and lied to and defrauded need to be compensated).

The banks can't keep paying bonuses to the head honchos yet deny those at the coalface the funding required to assist victims. The Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) has already revealed that once banks had decided to pay compensation, on average it took another 217 days before the first such payment to a customer was made.

217 days. And that's after the banks have acknowledged there's a problem. What do you think would happen to you if you were 217 days late with a credit card payment? Or if you failed to pay your insurance premiums on time?

But here's what we discovered last week. Counsel assisting the commission, warrior Rowena Orr, asked AMP's head of advice compliance, Sarah Britt, when clients would be contacted or compensated by the company for losses considering the company's principles on remediation include timeliness.

"No. I don't think we can argue that we've been timely, given we still haven't contacted them," Ms Britt said. Nor could she say when they would be contacted.

It's more than bad apples. It's a system which is trying to preserve its reputation in the face of all evidence. As one esteemed company director told me: "I fundamentally disagree that this is just a few bad apples or particular individuals. If the system was fine in all other respects, yes, but the system is still broken. There is a lack of ability to prioritise fixing the harm banks have done to their customers."

Get rid of them all and replace them with boards of great diversity, gender, ethnicity, thinking. My God we need some diverse thinking.

Jenna Price is a Fairfax columnist and an academic at the University of Technology Sydney.