How chivalry is destroying the careers of women in finance

Finance has always been an old boy’s club. That's changing, but only – and well-intentioned senior staff are slowing that transition down further.

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A report from the Diversity Project, a charity focused on fostering inclusivity in the "investments and savings industry", shed some light on the issue in asset management specifically. It suggested the industry is plagued by a lack of “psychological safety” among its female employees.

Chivalry is partly to blame. “If a male PM [portfolio manager] shares a cab with a female analyst,” the report found, “he might ask about her toddler’s nursery.” This seeming act of camaraderie and understanding, however, does severe damage to one’s professional reputation.

This is because the same PM likely asks male analysts “whether he is being staffed on the right stocks and getting enough exposure in meetings.” This, in turn, means that male PMs are more nurturing and mentoring of their male juniors, rather than their female ones.

Equally deadly to a female analyst is a soft touch. “Junior women reported not being pushed by seniors to as high standards as junior men,” Diversity Project said, as male PMs seek to avoid being aggressive towards their female juniors. “The quality of work that seniors deem acceptable from a woman may be lower; they may be happy with the level that she is currently at, rather than stretching her further.”

This bigotry of low expectations also extends to pregnancy. Senior financiers have a poor understanding of how pregnancy impacts a woman: while women are held to lower standards than men, pregnant women are held to even lower standards. The lower workload given is either due to preconceived “diminished capacities”, or due to an anticipation that maternity leave would soon commence – and that there was no point in briefing the female analyst.

Pregnancy’s impact also went beyond changing expectations. For one, the promotion from analyst to PM typically comes around ten years into one’s career, around the time that most women want to have children. That promotion is “a career-defining juncture”, according to Diversity Project’s report.; “if a woman has not made PM, she likely never will and is viewed as a career analyst,” the report said.

Timing’s one pregnancy is also important beyond promotion concerns. One of Diversity Project’s interviewees said that they knew women who'd had abortions because they had just started a new job, and “being pregnant would expose them to too much career risk.”

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