In the Financial Sector, Women Really Are Losing (Jobs) - Building Gender Balanced Business

• The US financial sector has cut at least 260,000 jobs amid the financial crisis, according to Forbes magazine, with women making up 72% of those newly out of work. Women made up 64% of employment in the sector before the start of the crisis.

• Louise Marie Roth, a University of Arizona sociology professor and the author of “Selling Women Short: Gender Inequality on Wall Street”, lists several reasons women might be getting the brunt of the Wall Street lyaoffs:
1. “One of a Kind”: Women, especially top managers, are often isolated from one another within a company, making it easier to treat the outlier as a scapegoat.
2. The classic double standard on behavior: Women must be aggressive to make it in a man’s world, but are expected to be nice. Either way, they will send the wrong signal at least half of the time.
3. Subjective assessments: Reviews and evaluations are very far from objective, making subjective prejudices easy to highlight. Approaches like 360-degree reviews leave anyone who is not part of the dominant group at risk, especially when the economic crisis dictates a culling.
4. “Business as Usual”: “Instead of recognizing where the company may be failing,” Roth says, managers “intensify the existing cultural routine” — another way women are sure to be at a disadvantage.

• So is there hope, not just of preserving women’s jobs in the finance sector but also removing the counterproductive impulses listed above? Roth says, “Research on jobs that change from being more male-dominated to gender-mixed or female-dominated shows that this happens after the rewards and prestige decline, thus making the jobs less appealing to white men.” Such a solution is unlikely if the women are sent packing during the crisis.

The Glass Hammer report