UK
Today’s report from the Equality and Human Rights Commission, makes for depressing reason if you’re a woman in banking, particularly if you’re a woman in banking who takes things at face value.
Much is being made of the enormous pay discrepancy unearthed by the report: it says men’s bonuses are five times larger than women’s.
However, scrape the surface and it starts to look distinctly as if the size of the disparity is being heavily exaggerated.
The report cites the average woman’s bonus as just 2.9k and the average man’s bonus as 14.6k, suggesting people in the front office weren’t a big focus of the research. This is confirmed in the appendix: of 44 organisations scrutinized, only 9 were fund managers and financial intermediaries. The remainder included retail banks and building societies, including cashiers and call centre staff.
“The report covers all retail bankers and all secretaries. If you really wanted to look at the pay gap where it matters, you’d break out front office bankers above VP level,” says one senior female banker.
Moreover, the comments in the report (some of which are pasted below) are taken from only eight employees and ex-employees, including from the retail banking sector. Given the report’s authors, we suspect an element of selection bias.
The bankers we spoke to said women in the front office usually are paid less than men, but that the discrepancy is a lot less than 80%, and that it’s mostly down to differences in negotiating style and an inability to cope with the long hours.
“The gender pay gap persists because you’re trying to hire women into a completely male model which involves working from 7.30am in the morning until 7pm in the evening,” says one. “Once women hit a certain age [and have children] this doesn’t work.”
These women also told us that long hours are manageable if you don’t have children. If you do, they said it helps if you can afford a nanny, or have a man prepared to subjugate his career to your own.
“A lot of senior women in financial services are the main earners for their families,” another high ranking woman tells us. “There’s nothing like necessity to make you grit your teeth and put in the hours.”
She adds: “Qualitatively, I’ve found that an awful lot of the women who stop are those whose husbands are very successful bankers. Therefore, they don’t have to carry on once they have a family.”
Selected comments from the Equality and Human Rights Commission’s report:
“….it’s all very haphazard … It’s a gut feeling. I have 100,000 to play with … how much extra do they give to person X rather than person Y? Give a bit more to Y because they told me they are going to leave, X, I think she will stay; women tend to stay … in the industry and stick it out. They don’t tend to be the ones saying, “If you don’t pay me I am going to leave”, and so you end up greasing the squeakiest wheel.”
“…if she is not there from 5am until 7pm, someone else has to cover that work and that market’s open … there’s a whole desk of 20 of them covering it and she would be the only one that wasn’t, so in that sense, their point is: “I don’t care if it’s man or a woman, but not that person”… They don’t say, “We need a man for this job because it’s a long hours job or management job.”‘
“One woman who was denied flexible working was a fantastic sales person, one of the senior sales people in the group and the best producers. They wanted her doing 5am to 7pm Monday to Friday, and even if she could find a childcarer who would work those hours, she wanted to see the child during the week. She asked for reduced hours, five days a week, but she asked to come in at 8am rather than 5am. They said no so she left the industry.”
“Essentially if [a woman] goes on maternity leave … in the year that she goes out, because the bonus is entirely discretionary, the chances are she will be paid a little bit but not very much. In the year that she comes back, her new bonus will be calculated as a percentage of last year, which wasn’t very much … when they come back in their total comp[ensation] is actually about two years old. They don’t just lose the one year; they lose the second year as well because of that negotiation. Then what happens is even if they follow the same percentage change as the person who’s two years ahead of them, what you have is parallel lines and if you look at eight years after maternity leave, you will find that she’s probably where he was two years ago … So you couldn’t just say she’s been paid 50,000 less than he is, you have to say last year it was and the year before it was 50,000.”
I used to work in the Treasury desk with 7 men. I was the only lady in the Trading room & I was usually at my desk by 7.30 am although I travelled the longest to get to the City. Therefore, I do not agree with the comment that “Once women hit a certain age [and have children] this doesn’t work.”
It is all about whether you are still passionate about your career.
The city and banks are unable to deal with equality mainly due to the type of small men that end up being managers and directors there… their wives don’t work as they are normally trophies who are pampered at home and so they don’t understand. It’s nothing to do with being passionate that gets you through, it is being able to laugh at the fact that the city is full of retarded misogynists.
Spot on Wombat, laughter is the best medicine. After working in this pit for alomst 30 yrs, from trader roles to senior manager roles, as a mother and THE breadwinner for my family; being able to laugh it off and refusing to be treated like a doormat in the workplace, is what gets you through – no- i rephrase that. It’s what makes you really excel. Women need to believe in their worth; or if they don’t , they have to bluff the blokes out there and ACT like they believe.
Women need to believe in their worth; or if they don’t , they have to bluff the blokes out there and ACT like they believe.
In real time, mothers who outsource their children to nannies put making money ahead of making their children. The present is here and gone, and so are your children. You may live long enough to regret that the wonderful financial transactions brought about nothing but extraction and spoils for other pirates while you traded away your time with your children. Good for you. It’s all about you, isn’t it?
Actually, life is simply Darwinian and that is it. Money is the modern day equivalent of food. If women are not intelligent enough to work the sytem (and the brightest are the trophy wives because they have the most ‘food’ through the least work) then its their own fault.
(I am a female who has earned her own living – not very handsomely – and sacrificed having children and marriage on the altar of ‘equality’)
Ha Ha Ha