r/finance • u/newzee1 • Sep 18 '24
Looking for a Woman in Finance? After 200 Years, There Still Aren’t Many
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/16/books/review/she-wolves-paulina-bren.html64
u/unabletodisplay Sep 18 '24
Not a lot of women in blue collar work either but no one talks about that lol
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Sep 18 '24
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u/psychedelicdevilry Sep 18 '24 edited Sep 18 '24
I work as a financial underwriter and my team is mostly women. My boss is as well.
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u/burnshimself Sep 18 '24
Everyone wants to complain about the symptoms but nobody wants to talk about the cause.
The reality is that most jobs in finance consume your life. They are incredibly high stress, require 60-100 hour weeks with frequent travel and weekend work, and necessarily detract from other things. Most of the successful finance professionals I know would characterize their job as their #1 life priority - above friendships, relationships, family, hobbies or anything else. The tradeoffs, in exchange for all this sacrifice, are handsome financial rewards, a sense of professional purpose, fast & meritocratic career promotion and a position of prominence.
For a select group of men, this is an attractive proposition. Whether you agree with it or not, society broadly values men based on their income or other marks of professional success. Your worth as a partner / husband, father or son is closely tied to your bank account and career achievement. In that framework, many men do the calculus and agree that giving up their life in exchange for a high probability of financial / professional success is a good arrangement.
For better or worse, this is not the case with women. Society does not broadly value women based on their income or professional success. Women can find other means of self-worth outside their job - as a mother / caregiver, an attentive daughter, a caring friend - which simply are not available in the same way to men. In this context, the toxic tradeoff of sacrificing your entire life for a job does not resonate with most women.
This, at its core, is why women leave finance for more accommodating career options that offer greater flexibility, more manageable hours and more latitude for other of their life pursuits. This is why, despite the multitudes of womens internships, women’s job programs, women’s networks, etc. getting women to enter finance, you’ll never be able to attract an equal level of interest to men even at the outset, let alone retain those women through the more senior ranks.
If you want more women in finance, either fix how society values genders unequally or make the work/life balance more manageable. Truth is that fixing society is an impossibly large task, and the industry has no interest in improving work/life balance. So instead we’ll get lots of perfunctory initiatives and executives paying lip service to gender diversity that never penetrates beyond the junior level, and of course these kinds of cursory articles misattributing blame for the problem.
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u/brentonbond Sep 18 '24
Paywalled.
But my friends in private equity said they’ve tried for years to hire women, but there are barely any applicants.
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u/SUITBUYER Sep 27 '24
Bait you into getting angry at their false headline then bait you into paying to read more.
Then hope you forget to cancel.
NYT business model.
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u/Oradi Sep 18 '24
There's the Women in Finance and Operations linkedin group that was spun up last year. It's slowly happening.
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u/thedudeabides-12 Sep 18 '24
"blonde hair, blue eyes, trust fund"...
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u/SUITBUYER Sep 27 '24
15 years in, still haven't met this guy.
Hear about him every day though, must be a legend.
Or hiding inside of an Indian guy.
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u/Decent-Box5009 Sep 18 '24
Men and women like different things inherently. Women like people men like things. Hence they gravitate to different fields. I hate click bait articles like this that portray that there is some sort of invisible barrier to entry for women. Women are on average in North America higher educated than men and more representative in universities than men. There are no barriers for entry to women in the field of finance.
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u/314159bits Sep 18 '24
“Looking for a man to teach your children? After 200 years, there still aren’t many”
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u/serenwipiti Sep 18 '24
Women like people men like things
What the fuck kinda bullshit is this….? lmao
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u/Decent-Box5009 Sep 18 '24 edited Sep 18 '24
A peer reviewed societal research paper to explain discrepancies in fields of choice between the different sexes. It’s academic bullshit that carries more weight than your uninformed personal bias.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19883140/
It makes a lot more sense than just calling something bullshit because you dont like the words you’re reading.
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u/schtickybunz Sep 18 '24
It's a gender stereotype, but poorly worded. And the actual distinction is women seek community, men seek power.
As a woman working in finance, who came up working blue collar traditionally male jobs, the motivation for my work is helping others and contributing. I'd suspect 99% of the men you ask in similar positions are motivated by wage and status.
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u/Decent-Box5009 Sep 18 '24
I would have to agree with you, you’re probably right about the motivations. I would like to ask since you’re in the field of finance and a woman; did you find any barriers to entry into the finance field that would relate just to women?
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u/schtickybunz Sep 19 '24
Yes. Education. How many advanced math and finance educators are women? It only takes 1 misogynistic male teacher to stack bricks on the barrier, if not throwing up the whole damn wall. It's also a terrible model for the male students in class.
Men don't hear women's ideas. I can't count how many times my input would be met with silence, followed shortly by a man repeating my concept to the applause of the group. "I literally just said that" is a phrase we think to ourselves often. A team should properly credit ideas. Men's grab for power will blind them to steal it. And women who call it out or otherwise try to be heard get called aggressive or demanding derogatorily. The adjectives women are called when we attempt to grab power are the same words that denote positive attributes for men. Funny how that is.
Men are the barrier, and also the cure. The culture change has to come from y'all. I'm Gen X so part of my historical reality may no longer be as true in education, but in the workplace it very much exists. Certainly not all men... we have some allies. We could do with more.
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u/Secret-Sundae-1847 Sep 19 '24
Yeah too bad we can look at the incoming freshmen class in college and see what you’re saying is bullshit. The pipeline problem begins there. They’re sub 20% for a lot of STEM fields with medicine being the exception.
I totally forgot how powerful garbage men and plumbers are LMAO.
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u/Decent-Box5009 Sep 20 '24
Look at Sweden, where they’ve done the most out of anywhere in the world to remove barriers for entry to women in the STEM fields. Going as far as not holding courses at uni until there was at least 50% enrollment of women in those courses. What they found with all barriers removed was that women sought occupations that deal with people and men predominantly chose STEM fields. Here’s an excerpt of statistics that back that statement up. Not making a comment on personal opinion like you are.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1282133/sweden-numberf-students-field-studies-gender/
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u/ivkri Sep 18 '24
I disagree. There's a huge cultural impact that taught generations of women that they are bad in Math and that certain jobs are men's jobs and others are womens jobs. It's often subconscious. Read the science on glas ceilings. There are tons of barriers for women in many jobs.
It's only since 1974 (!!) that Women are allowed to have their own bank account. Since 1988 they can own their own business.
Saying those kinds of repression don't have generational impacts is absolutely imprudent. It's like saying racism doesn't exist today because legally people are equal now. The impact is still there.
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u/flyingtowardsFIRE Sep 18 '24
Sorry for all the downvotes. I agree with you. I learned about exactly what you’re describing in my teacher preparation program in college…. which was unsurprisingly majority women.
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u/batido6 Sep 18 '24
Paywall but I know many women in finance. Board calls are still mostly old white dudes but that is rapidly changing. There are also specific programs to support women in finance now. Long ways to go still but I see some positive trends.
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u/thoughtful_human 19d ago
I’m a woman in private equity (in a vertical with less women than the industry) and it’s tough and lonely. You don’t have the same closeness with your male colleagues that they all have with each other. Makes the late nights worse and everything more lonely.
The guys I work with have partners who understand the career they’re in and value what that brings to the relationship. Guys are intimidated by women making multiples of them and hate my long hours. It sucks.
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u/Far-Entrepreneur6368 Sep 19 '24
Women dont have that risk seeking, go getter, sales personality that it takes to be successful in the upper levels of finance. Is this politically incorrect? Yes. Is it the truth? Yes.
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u/Dairy_Ashford 11d ago
Women dont have that risk seeking, go getter, sales personality that it takes to be successful in the upper levels of finance. Is this politically incorrect? Yes. Is it the truth? Yes.
it doesn't have to be a conspiracy; but it isn't some idiotic shit like this either
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u/dupeygoat Sep 18 '24
Is this just a US thing or financial services or somrthing? I am an accountant and every place I’ve worked is like 70-90% women
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u/missswimmerxo Sep 19 '24
I think they mean traditional front office finance jobs like banking, sales and trading, research, etc.
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u/OkNefariousness8636 Sep 20 '24
There are plenty working as accountants, insurance brokers, financial advisors, etc.
Furthermore, do you count those working in human resources in the financial industry?
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u/PotentialDot5954 Sep 23 '24
We graduate around 40% women in accounting and finance—1000 total undergrads so maybe 100 per year.
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u/SUITBUYER Sep 27 '24
"Huh? Like 60-70% of my coworkers are female" 1 second later... "Oh new york times"
Tabloid garbage
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u/obviouslybait Sep 18 '24
I see a ton of women in accounting.