Anita Raghavan's recent article in Forbes looks like an appropriate sequel to my last post where we posed the question, "Should Women Rule Wall Street?," so I picked it for this post.
Even if biology provides a positive answer to that question, that day may remain a pipe dream in the foreseeble future, if we are to conclude from Ms. Raghavan's anecdotal evidence. The reason? The old boys' network allegedly remains a formidable stumbling block even to this day. But hey, what about the supposed junking of sexist employment practices by investment banks after the 1990s scandals? Sorry, we thought, too, that equal opportunity employment policies have been adopted since then, but apparently some unsightly wrinkles remain. Like this one.
Since the start of the financial crash last year, 72% percent of the 260,000 jobs so far which have been slashed by financial services and insurance firms have been women, according to Ms. Raghavan. There is reportedly an increasing number women bankers--at Citigroup, Merrill Lynch, Bank of America and Bank of Tokyo--who are suing for having been "unfairly fired," but plenty others don't sue "for fear of being a pariah in the industry."
It's easy to get emotional over this matter if you're among the women bankers given pink slips, but let's be fair by getting the view of employment specialists:
How do we know, they ask, whether the women who were fired were as talented as the men who survived or replaced them? Another argument against the plaintiff's claims: Perhaps some new moms and older women have simply lost their mojo. Yet another response is that the subject of gender is irrelevant. "It is really a misguided notion to focus on whether women are victims in recessions," says Alison Fraser, director of economic policy studies at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C. "What is important here is all Americans are suffering, and they are suffering at every level."
Hmm, that sounds logical, too. What do you think?
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