Women Still Earning Less than Men in Finance

[Andy Nguyen]

The financial activities sector is last in paying women as much as men, according to a new breakdown of data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The bureau released a chart on Wednesday that displays women's median weekly earnings as a percentage's of men's across multiple industries in 2009.

According to the data, with women in financial activities earn only 71% of what men earned: women made $732 a week, compared to $1,039 a week for men.

The chart is skewed, however, because it doesn't compare individual occupations among the industries. For instance, it doesn't account for the fact that about 70% of trading jobs are filled by men and that trading is a particularly high-paying occupation.

To provide a better sense of how like occupations within the finance industry compare, the BLS provided FINS with the breakdown of women's-to-men's-earnings ratios in finance by specific occupation from 2000 to 2010.

For financial managers, which includes bank directors and managers, women earned 66% of what men did in 2010, or $1,022 per week for every $1,546 per week that men took in. That number holds steady from 2009 and is an increase from 2003, when the ratio was 62.6%, or $823 weekly compared to $1,314.

http://www.fins.com/Finance/Article.../Women-Still-Earning-Less-than-Men-in-Finance

 

[DominiConnor]

The article glances at the important point which is that women don't do the same jobs, so what useful data we can extract is hard to tell. It actually surprises me that women earn as much as 73% of men, so given the shallowness of the survey I'd bet money they only looked at base salary ignoring bonuses.

A better study would be to compare equivalently educated women with men, since the education level and subjects of men are quite different. Girls far more often choose soppy subjects, and are thus effectively unemployable in banking, so I strongly suspect that the distribution cited included a lot of secretaries, back office, admin, compliance and the general background noise.

If you compared like with like, you'd still find that the women earn less than the men, but you'd get a better insight into why, and what can be done about it.

Sure some of that's sexism, but I despair at the tragically poor social skills of so many women in finance, which unlike sexism is relatively easy to fix. Also they need to be able to fake better. I have more than once been in the situation where I have being offering serious money to a woman over 25 getting the impression that she may either cry or slap me.

I've had female candidates just stare blankly at me when I asked them "what part of this work do you most enjoy" as a warm up question, indeed I don't ask that one to women any more because I so rarely get a useful answer.
A couple of years I grabbed a 7 year old girl, from her mother, picked her up and ran across a field, where on a cloudy day I drenched her in cold water for 15 minutes, reverting to an intimidating posture when it was suggested I might stop.

Imagine the look on her face when she sees me these days. Yep, that's the look I see so often from female candidates.

(She'd had very hot coffee spilt on her from above, I had switched directly into first responder mode, and concluded to prevent really quite nasty scarring on her face and upper torso, I was to act now and explain later. It's quite unintuitive how long you have to apply cold water even for short contact burns, 10 mins is minimum)

Most bankers are actually overpaid computer operators, with quants being overpaid programmers, and most other bankers being some sort of data entry clerk. Many traders are also programmers (with horrible results), which is one of the many reasons so few women are in that line of work. The % of women who really hate computers is something sociologists ought to investigate (or psychiatrists since many women ascribe characteristics to computers which come straight out of textbooks on clinical paranoia). Some women will tell me how much they hate computers even without being asked, and every so often I'm so deeply in headhunter mode that they will tell me their thoughts about IT pros without realising that my passport still says programmer. To quote one "you're not autistic like those geeks". I think it was a compliment.

Women do far less networking than men. and if you remove from the sample women who are specifically hired to mingle such as sales people, then it's possible to imagine that banking women don't do it at all.