Leaning Out: Number of Women in Finance Declines

在过去一年中，少数杰出的妇女帮助重振了对员工中的性别集体上升的对话。前任美国国务院的政策规划主任安妮 - 玛丽屠杀了2012年6月在大西洋文章中谈到了辩论，“为什么女性仍然无法拥有这一切。”去年秋天，记者汉娜罗斯在她的书中取得了另一边The End of Men: And the Rise of Women,built on the optimistic premise that women’s increasingly dominant role within the global economy is all but assured. This March, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg gave her views on modern workplace feminism in倾向于：女性，工作和威力, advising women on how best to climb the corporate ladder.

Sandberg对妇女的建议如何在金融服务业中欢迎如何最大限度地欢迎妇女在管理水平中的戏剧性强名如此明显，这更有可能举起肩膀而不是眉毛。也许更令人惊讶 - 肯定不太讨论 - 事实上，尽管只要十年前就金融公司的多样性办公室创造了多样性办事处，但华尔街上的女性比例落下。

Women are actually overrepresented across all levels of the financial services industry. They accounted for 56.1 percent of workers in finance and insurance in 2012, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. But this data is skewed by the large number of women in lower-level-clerical and bank teller positions. Women account for less than a third of executives at the senior management level — and that proportion is shrinking. Between 2007 and 2011, representation among top management within financial firms went from 30 percent to 28.4 percent, according to an April 2013 Government Accountability Office report.

Goldman Sachs, for example, says that 20 percent of the firm’s senior management positions were filled by women as of August 2012. At Citigroup, just 15 percent of senior managers were women as of July 2012. During that period, nearly a quarter of the senior managers at JPMorgan Chase & Co. were women.

Meanwhile, the number of women in financial services as a whole is declining. In the decade between 2002 and 2012, 200,000 women left the finance and insurance industries, even as 237,000 men joined, the BLS data reveals. Securities, commodities, funds, trusts and other financial investments had the least amount of gender diversity — women comprised 38.6 percent of workers in 2012, according to the BLS data.

为什么金融服务世界的这一部分很难进入？虽然华尔街已经从Michael Lewis的经典描绘的80年代的男性主导的文化中走了很长的路亚慱体育app怎么下载Liar’s Poker, there’s clearly still a cultural problem. The best recent example came at a University of Virginia investment symposium in April. When asked during one of the panels about the lack of diversity among macro traders, hedge fund managerPaul Tudor Jones II responded,“你永远不会看到男性，期间，故事结束时的许多伟大的女性投资者或贸易商。”他说，原因是，一旦孩子们，他们就会成为妇女的长期缺乏焦点。(The founder of Greenwich, Connecticut–based hedge fund firm Tudor Investment Corp. has since apologized for his statement.) Unsavory as Jones’s comments — and reasoning — may have been, they do raise a legitimate question: Is it true that we’ll never see as many women as men in certain areas of finance like trading?

Daniel Garcia-Diaz, director of the U.S. Government Accountability Office and one of the authors of the GAO report that looked into diversity at all levels of the financial services industry, discussed the gender imbalance and the factors causing it with the heads of various firms’ diversity offices in the course of his research. “There’s nothing we found that was terribly conclusive or that fully explains what we’re seeing in the data,” he tellsInstitutional Investor.

Firm representatives complained, says Diaz-Garcia, that the applicant pools from which they recruit are already plagued by a lack of diversity. (About 37 percent of the graduates of MBA programs were female from 2007 to 2011, according to the GAO report.) This doesn’t explain, however, why women would be so poorly represented at the very top levels of an organization, even though they’re better represented in levels directly below and overrepresented firmwide. “Sometimes the people on the track looking for promotions into senior positions” are disproportionately white men, Diaz-Garcia says, “which magnifies that effect as you go higher into an organization.”

The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010 could help address the finance industry’s gender gap. One of Dodd-Frank’s provisions requires the creation of Offices of Minority and Women Inclusion at 20 regulatory agencies. Pamela Gibbs, director of this new office at the Securities and Exchange Commission, says her office is in the very early steps of drafting a set of diversity standards for its regulated entities. “I think the initial impulse [of financial firms] is, ‘Okay, they’re our regulators,’” she explains. “But, hopefully, over time, with the establishment of these offices, we can get them to trust that we all have a mutual goal of advancing diversity.”