Where Are All the City Girls?
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A quick look around any trading floor will confirm there is a serious shortage of females working in the City’s investment banks - save the sexed-up secretaries, of course.
It gets worse when you look at the glitzy word of hedge funds, where an estimated 7% of employees are women, a figure that falls to 1% in the most senior positions. In fact, the Observer reported in 2007 that “Hedge funds...are the most misogynistic, male-dominated environments in the world - up there with Michelin-starred restaurant kitchens and, say, oil rigs.” So what’s with the City’s male-domination? A gender gap exists in many occupations, of course, but the disparity in the banking (especially at the most senior levels) sector hits close to one of the scariest marks of all, which begs the question: Where are all the City Girls? Are men more suited for the rough-and-tumble City playing field than women?
This concern expands into two questions: 1) Are women handicapped by their upbringing, societal pressures, and discrimination? or 2) Are women simply worse at that crucial City skill - math - than men?
The answer to the first question is clear: Yes, and in my opinion, societal pressures are the root cause - not discrimination from City Boys. Many women are far more interested in their families than building careers, and society clearly approves of their bias. Because the leading City careers do demand excessive amounts of time and dedication to goals that may even be considered by some people as selfish, this turns off family-orientated women who would be more satisfied in flexible jobs that would actually allow them (not their nannies) to raise their kids.
The second question is more provocative. On average, the math IQ of females is equal to the average of males. But averages can be misleading. For instance, more males score at the extreme tops and bottoms of the intelligence scale. This could account for the greater number of men within investment banking, and on the other hand, in prisons. So does the gender disparity in banking give credence to the idea that men hold finer mathematical abilities than women? My answer is 'no' and here is my reasoning:
No evidence indicates that banking attracts the brightest people. The unspoken assumption is that society’s highest-paid individuals are the smartest, and thus, if the City is filled with men, men must be smarter, unless women have a good excuse for being absent. Naturally, banking - like all very well paid jobs - attracts highly intelligent people, but only the ones with certain personality traits. Those traits might be more common in men. Maybe girls simply don’t find the number-crunching, inside-trading, hostile-takeover games of investment banking as fascinating. In the same way that you never find any female dictators, perhaps females just don’t have the killer instincts it takes to bulldoze their way to a questionable sort of 'City success'. Surely, ruthlessness and mathematical talent are not necessarily correlated. So why should anyone be shocked to find that most mathematically-gifted people - including women - would flee from the idea of spending their waking life working amongst the City’s abrasive predators?
Indeed, nothing sounds more tempting.
This concern expands into two questions: 1) Are women handicapped by their upbringing, societal pressures, and discrimination? or 2) Are women simply worse at that crucial City skill - math - than men?
The answer to the first question is clear: Yes, and in my opinion, societal pressures are the root cause - not discrimination from City Boys. Many women are far more interested in their families than building careers, and society clearly approves of their bias. Because the leading City careers do demand excessive amounts of time and dedication to goals that may even be considered by some people as selfish, this turns off family-orientated women who would be more satisfied in flexible jobs that would actually allow them (not their nannies) to raise their kids.
The second question is more provocative. On average, the math IQ of females is equal to the average of males. But averages can be misleading. For instance, more males score at the extreme tops and bottoms of the intelligence scale. This could account for the greater number of men within investment banking, and on the other hand, in prisons. So does the gender disparity in banking give credence to the idea that men hold finer mathematical abilities than women? My answer is 'no' and here is my reasoning:
No evidence indicates that banking attracts the brightest people. The unspoken assumption is that society’s highest-paid individuals are the smartest, and thus, if the City is filled with men, men must be smarter, unless women have a good excuse for being absent. Naturally, banking - like all very well paid jobs - attracts highly intelligent people, but only the ones with certain personality traits. Those traits might be more common in men. Maybe girls simply don’t find the number-crunching, inside-trading, hostile-takeover games of investment banking as fascinating. In the same way that you never find any female dictators, perhaps females just don’t have the killer instincts it takes to bulldoze their way to a questionable sort of 'City success'. Surely, ruthlessness and mathematical talent are not necessarily correlated. So why should anyone be shocked to find that most mathematically-gifted people - including women - would flee from the idea of spending their waking life working amongst the City’s abrasive predators?
Indeed, nothing sounds more tempting.
Here Is The Writer : The Black Swan
The Black Swan left her job as a derivatives trader in the City of London to become an author and financial journalist. Having escaped, she found that while you can take the girl out of the City, you can never take the City out of the girl. She writes a blog about economics, business, culture and, of course, the City's latest gossip. To read more, click here.
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