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Career Resources
My groups 1st year class has more girls than guys
I'm going to assume your bank is heavily male-dominated, otherwise you would've known that they're referred to as women and not females
He prob works at Jeffries and all the women have left
Dumb
Did you notice that that poster uses “male” non-chalantly while getting upset over the term “female”?
As a woman / female, I don't get my feelings hurt over being called a "female" instead of a "woman." I have bigger things than semantics to cry about.
I think that recruitment is easiest to control at the analyst and associate-levels because of the structured recruitment and the exit opportunities that draw people in. Beyond that there's a few reasons I think you have less women around:
- Family: After 6-10 years, when people are entering the VP and beyond-level, many women have to/choose to take a career pause to start a family. This sets them back a few years during a crucial point in their careers when they are expected to manage relationships, lead juniors, and take on more responsibility. Having a break in this period throws things off and sets them back compared to peers because many senior people hold these decisions against women.
- Promotions: Promotions are less regular and more based on mentorship, firm politics, client relationships, etc. If you have taken a few years off, it can make it harder to maintain those relationships. Every day you're out of the office someone is competing to win your business.
- Attrition: Not many people stick around for long haul. Given that the 50-50 recruitment goals are a recent phenomenon, it will take a long time to see the benefits of diverse classes paying off. If, let's say, only 10% of each class is sticking around in banking for the long-term, then you need a very large number of people of each gender/race/whichever identity to see meaningful representation at the upper echelons of banking.
Probably better for an actual woman to chime in but as a man who asked this question before, these are some of the answers I got.
The amount of people who say "females" instead of "women" in the comments is staggering and telling.
So I know this has been said - but as a learning moment- please call us women - women. We don't call men boys or males. The term female and girl are not the preferred respectful noun when describing our gender. And to answer your question - at my level the ratio of women to men is around 5-10% women to men. Generally on a call with 10-15 people I'm the only woman there.
Respectfully, I'm female / a woman and I don't claim to speak on behalf of an entire gender, but I don't regard either term as a pejorative. I think people may be reading too much into semantics here - the only reason I used the term "female" was because I had "female representation" in mind and it's not commonplace to refer to "women representation." But each to their own - and thank you all the same for your answer to my original question.
There are a lot of articles explaining about it why it's inappropriate to use this term to describe women. Check them out but here are a few:
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-should-you-stop-referring-women-fema…
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/comma-queen/female-trouble-the-debate…
https://medium.com/@hollymeijohnson/the-problem-with-referring-to-women…
Females in finance have super Type-A personalities. Which is fine but I pretty much immediately exclude a girl as a potential partner if I know she works in finance / law. Pretty much anything else is fine tho
I don't know why this hasn't been mentioned in any of the posts above - but easy to have 50/50 splits or better at junior levels. As you move up, yes family and politics come into play - but as an execution VP now at a smaller firm, having left much bigger BB and MM firms, I can tell you that I HIGHLY underestimated the politics that come into play. It doesn't just get in the way with your superiors / MDs in navigating promotions, but also your management. How many times I have to turn comments myself, make my own books because juniors refuse to do it unless an MD (men usually) bark out the orders? This is all fine when you're junior because you think to listen to everyone, but all of a sudden you're responsible for business development as well as execution, and you can't get the team to help you with your ideas, so you have to manage that yourself in addition to all the other responsibilities. So while juniors are all curious as to why women don't stay on, take a look at yourselves too - do you treat women fairly? Do you question them more than your superiors that are men? Do you give truthful and thoughtful 360 reviews or feedback to other MDs what it's like to work with you, or do you contribute to to the toxic environment, and say that your female associate / VP / MD whatnot, is "demanding", "b*tchy", "too aggressive," "doesn't ask you enough about how your weekend was or if you caught the game last night" - and then senior mgmt who already is biased against women, are even more biased because women can't motivate a team, or push a team to do better quality work or more output like men staffers can?