The Obama administration still hasn’t appointed Elizabeth Warren to head the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, much to the delight of big banks and to the disappointment of almost everyone else.

President Obama claims to support the Bureau’s goals, so why wouldn’t he put the person who thought of it, advocated for it, and pushed it into law in charge?

According to the National Organization for Women, the Obama administration might be hesitant to appoint Elizabeth Warren because of her gender. The truth, I suspect, has less to do with present sexism and more to do with old sexist institutions. Treasury officials see Warren as a threat to the old banking boys’ club. She is an outsider and critic, and they fear she will upset the comfortable financial structure that they have built.

That is exactly the reason she should get the job.

With books like Michael Lewis’s The Big Short, Wall Street lionizes men who get it right, get ignored, and get rich betting on their doomsday predictions. When a public policy expert foresees a crisis, though, she gets attacked as the new Cassandra.

Elizabeth Warren, unlike many people who have traditionally headed regulation efforts, has a long record of being right. She first outlined the idea of the Bureau in a 2007 Democracy: A Journal of Ideas article, in which she elegantly explained the need to regulate financial products:

“It is impossible to buy a toaster that has a one-in-five chance of bursting into flames and burning down your house. But it is possible to refinance an existing home with a mortgage that has the same one-in-five chance of putting the family out on the street–and the mortgage won’t even carry a disclosure of that fact to the homeowner. Similarly, it’s impossible to change the price on a toaster once it has been purchased. But long after the papers have been signed, it is possible to triple the price of the credit used to finance the purchase of that appliance, even if the customer meets all the credit terms, in full and on time. Why are consumers safe when they purchase tangible consumer products with cash, but when they sign up for routine financial products like mortgages and credit cards they are left at the mercy of their creditors?”

That’s not her only prescient writing. The Wall Street Journal analyzed a blog that she co-founded and contributed to between 2006 and 2008. Her topics included the problems with subprime lending, unintelligible contracts, unregulated mortgage markets, payday lenders, and murky and soon-to-be-illegal forms of credit-card marketing. All before they were fashionable.

Her blog posts on CreditSlips often discussed these issues through the perspective of struggling families, since she “cannot think of a credit issue that does not affect an American family.” Warren might be a Harvard Law School professor, but she approaches financial issues in a far less abstract and detached manner than most finance officials. Focusing on the needs of financial consumers rather than the requests of the powerful producers, she defies the regulatory agency norm of switching back and forth between private business and public oversight.

A Newsweek profile stated that “the job should be hers if it weren’t for some intramural friction that has taken on a gender cast.” Hank Paulsen, former Treasury Secretary, not to mention former Goldman Sachs CEO, earned Warren’s criticism over his handling of the Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP). Now his disciple, Timothy Geithner, runs the Treasury – and Warren remains skeptical. We can hope that the friction between her and the men of the Treasury Department will ease now that Geithner has expressed public respect, rather than private disdain for her.

The financial industry does not need another man who knows – and has benefited from – the system from the inside. It needs someone, in this case Elizabeth Warren, who has resisted it.

*And a bonus, for those who read this through: Watch the President of the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, Heidi Hartmann, and the “Money Coach,” Lynette Khalfani-Cox, make the Prudential-study-based case for Elizabeth Warren at out SheSource event earlier this week.