When the “deal” involved in committing themselves to getting to the top is worse for women, it is no wonder that fewer women take it. In short, women in financial services face a tougher career trade-off of higher costs and lower expected benefits. With a woman, she has to prove it first.” Consequently, many women lose confidence that they can succeed, and lower their ambitions or quit. This helps to explain the very high quality of senior women in financial services as one of our interviewees observed, “Some of the men at the top are extraordinary, but all of the women are.” As one senior woman we interviewed explained, “Firms are more willing to take risks on men. The result is that women are implicitly held to a higher standard than their male colleagues. As a result, “we end up having to ‘masculinize’ our female traits,” one younger banker said. Even our definition of leadership often follows stereotypical male characteristics. An effective senior banker is (wrongly) imagined to be aggressive, dominating, transactional - characteristics that are stereotypically masculine and that are, as a matter of statistical fact, more commonly associated with men, as a recent study called “The Athena Doctrine” showed. The problem is not simply the tone or atmosphere of the workplace it is the unstated ideas about what is required for success in the financial industry. They are the ones who set the culture that we experience every day, despite any programmatic efforts by the bank.” As one Millennial banker we interviewed put it: “All of our senior leaders are older white males. Shifting from university to the financial industry, they experience a culture shock. Given the general progress of gender equality, especially in education, most twentysomethings do not. Their female predecessors, entering the financial industry in the 1980s and 1990s, expected to deal with a certain amount of sexism. This comes as a surprise to the many younger women entering the profession. The overt sexism of earlier times may have been stamped out, but unconscious biases and gender-role expectations that disadvantage women have not. Responses revealed a culture that has changed surprisingly little over the last 30 years. To find out, Oliver Wyman surveyed 850 financial services professionals from around the world (both men and women), interviewed over 100 senior female executives globally (C-suite and board members), and held focus groups with Millennial women working across a number of financial institutions in the U.S. What explains the poor career prospects of women in financial services? But now, five years into it, I am planning my escape.” One young female banker we interviewed for our 2016 report “Women in Financial Services” even told us, “I came into my career in financial services with aspirations to make it to the top. As a result, women’s prospects are significantly worse in financial services than in other sectors, a recent study conducted by our sister company Mercer discovered. Women are far more likely than men to leave the industry or to reduce their level of ambition just at the point in their careers when they need to make the effort to push on to the top. financial firms are women.Ĭareer progression analysis also shows that at each level, men are promoted at materially higher rates than women. Only 12% of the chief executive officers of large U.S. An analysis that we conducted of disclosures made by 50 American financial services companies revealed that women occupy only 20% of executive committee roles and 22% of board positions. Bureau of Labor Statistics.īut this seemingly impressive statistic disguises an underlying lack of progress of gender equality in financial services. Women still aren’t making it to the top. Today 47% of management and professional roles in American financial firms are occupied by women, according to the U.S. In the 1980s, however, pioneering women began moving into management roles and into frontline business areas, such as investment banking. Financial institutions have been employers of women for decades: historically as tellers, secretaries, and junior administrative staff.
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