An Insight Into Breaking The Glass Ceiling: Challenges Faced By Women In Investment Banking.
Investment banking has been a high-profile and high-stakes profession for several decades. However, there remains the glaring fact that it is still not a female-friendly profession. Certainly, more women today are entering the finance world than ever before; however, they claw their way up through the ranks with difficulty. Having made that point, barriers to women in investment banking do mark equal representation and promotion.
Old Boys Club Still Exist
Men decide the way to the deal at the local bar, the golf course or informal gatherings. Women are almost always excluded from such informal forums for mentoring or client presentations, for after-work drinks become so crucial for development of a deal.
Work-Life Balance: An Ancient Struggle
It gets very fitting that such an “always-on” approach to maintenance of long hours for investment banking women are so incongruent in that culture. Most managers regard maternity leave, flexible hours as slower paths for women in career tracks. Thus, women are thus left with a most unfortunate decision between career ambitions and family life, an absurd predicament which men would scarcely ever have to ponder.
Pay and Promotion Gaps
So long as the company structure allows for hidden pay gaps, women will be disfavorably affected by them, while attributing their lack of success to inefficiency. This is then masked as a meritocratic scheme, thus allowing them to obscure the fact that their workforce is predominantly male whenever an investigation is made into women’s underrepresentation to promotions and bonuses-or even lower bonuses than that of men-for the same achievements and performance.
Perception Biases and Barriers
More subtle but damaging biases still plague hiring and leadership selection. According to these, women are held not to be assertive enough, and are furthermore seen as unwilling to take risks, especially when it comes to closing a deal. These stereotypical perceptions negatively impact ratings of theirs; moreover, they hold a disincentivizing potency for many intelligent and gifted women striving for leadership roles.
Road to Equity
But the change is sneaking in. A number of new mentoring programs, return-to-work plans for new mothers, and diversity targets have been initiated by banks globally. Cracks in the glass ceiling are appearing, courtesy of leaders like Jane Fraser at Citigroup and Marianne Lake at JPMorgan Chase, albeit the ceiling has not yet been shattered.
Conclusion: Barriers remain insidiously around the roadways for women in investment banking, and with every challenge comes a golden opportunity for change. From the onset of fair pay structures to a serious commitment on work-life balance support and inclusive leadership, it is the industry’s duty to convert itself from the exclusionary space it has operated in for so long to one where women are empowered and where success is keyed to merit and hard work.
Add comment