In May, my sister and I wrote an opinion editorial for the Financial Times posing the question: why are senior women so rare in finance? We took as the starting point the recently published UK parliamentary treasury committee report: "Women in the City". This report stated that the statistics looked bleak. There were only four female chief executives of FTSE 100 companies and women constituted 9% of the board members of FTSE 100 banks and 2% of bank executive directors.
I thought our article was balanced. We tried not to blame bank management for the dearth of top females in the industry. Instead we argued that the problem is complex and partly arises from the choices women make. This gender gap is a supply as well as a demand problem. We quoted senior banker Nichola Pease’s evidence to the committee: "I think the pyramid structure means that as you go up an organization, because of women’s choices, there are fewer senior women to chose from." We concluded that reaching the top in finance was a long, hard slog and potential solutions such as compulsory quotas that hint at entitlement are not the answer.
The article generated a lot of debate on the FT’s letters page. The most insightful letter came from Chandana Ganguly, a postgraduate student at the University of Oxford, who wrote: "The perception of women in banking is a self-fulfilling prophecy. A dearth of women in the past has created few success stories, casting doubt as to whether we would be able to achieve what has rarely been done before. As a result, many of us quit before the race begins. Although there may not be a conspiracy to keep us out of the ‘old boys’ club’, there may be a scarcity of mentors to encourage us."
I was particularly intrigued by a bellicose epistle from a group of female "finance grandees" including Noreen Doyle, a Credit Suisse non-executive board member; Judith Mayhew Jonas, a former Merrill Lynch non-executive board member; and Helena Morrissey, chief executive of Newton Investment Management, part of Bank of New York Mellon’s asset management platform. The letter, which accused us of stumbling into gender stereotypes, ended with a call to arms: "Let us not trivialize the debate with tabloid clichés about City women stamping their expensive heels. Instead, let us ensure that men and women who are in a position to take action do so, and swiftly."
The word "swiftly" is not a relative term. It means fast. I am therefore surprised that given that Doyle has been on Credit Suisse’s board of directors for six years, the gender composition of that board has remained constant. In other words, Doyle has been the only woman on the board of directors since 2004. In that period, the executive board has added one woman to its serried ranks of white men in suits. Today the composition of that 14-person board is 93% male, 7% female. I doubt that ratio mirrors the gender composition of Credit Suisse’s client base.
Of course, this imbalance, while regrettable, is not solely Doyle’s fault, other board members are also culpable. Nevertheless, I would not say that while Doyle (whom a mole describes as "formidable") has been in a position of influence at Credit Suisse, progress on this issue has been "swift". An impeccable internal source muses: "It’s not fair to blame Noreen: she has constantly pushed the diversity issue internally."
Is Dame Judith Mayhew Jonas in a position "to take action swiftly" to increase the number of senior women in finance? She does not seem to be currently involved in the world of finance either as an executive or a non-executive director. She is, however, a trustee of the Imperial War Museum: another body that has a stunning gender imbalance (19 men and one woman). Mayhew Jonas obviously knows about finance: she was a non-executive director of Merrill Lynch during some dark days for the firm (2006-08). I am not sure what to make of the fact that Dame Judith’s profile on the Imperial War Museum’s website doesn’t even refer to her period as a non-executive director of Merrill Lynch although many other accomplishments are listed.
To single out Credit Suisse or Merrill Lynch is invidious. The lack of senior female financiers is an industry-wide rather than firm-specific phenomenon. I looked at the gender composition of the main boards of Goldman Sachs (one woman, 10 men), HSBC (three women, 15 men), JPMorgan (two women, nine men) and UBS (two women, nine men) and could only roll my eyes in horror at the data. We can all agree that women are grossly under-represented at senior levels in the financial industry. It is more difficult to identify the causes of this under-representation. One banker put it bluntly: "Abigail, this is a world created for men by men. It’s like the military. A lot of male bankers will pay lip service to diversity but stall when it comes to real change. They say: ‘I’m all for more women but in my department, we simply can’t accommodate part-time or flexible working hours.’"
The solution to the problem is unlikely to be swift. In fact, I fear it will be a tortuously protracted process. The chicken-and-egg analogy applies. Women in the ranks look up and see hardly any role models. Disheartened, they leave the industry. Bank chief executives, badgered by the diversity lobby, search for suitable women to add to their boards and find few who have top-level experience. In fact, I can think of only three women who are running divisions in investment banks: Mary Callahan Erdoes, Jane Fraser, and Sallie Krawcheck.
Does it matter that there are few senior women in finance? There aren’t many female air pilots or female taxi drivers and I haven’t read any opinion editorials in erudite financial journals bewailing this deficit. Indeed it would be interesting to compare the gender data for another well-paid, high-stress, long-hours profession: management consultancy. All one can ask for is that talented women who want to reach the top in banking have the opportunity to do so. And that their advancement is not hindered by antediluvian, chauvinistic prejudices.
