Women in Finance

Lack of talent (physical attraction) and disproportionate amount of geeky Asians.

Just an observation from a couple of large industry conferences.

Exception for chicks in S&T.

What kind of conference?

Not in investor relations/sales. That’s pratically all it is.

Industry investor conferences.

That explains it. My industry conferences have maybe 10% women tops. The perk is no lines to the bathroom:)

haha that’s why i am special~!

actually not true, i know many women who dress nice working in accounting and finance in asia, not in japan but from hong kong or singapore…

dressing nicely == being good looking.

No, but being put together/well taken care of does help.

they look nice too, i mean, there are no ugly women only lazy ones, so if women take care of themselves and wear nice clothes and do their hair and makeup they can’t look THAT awful.

There’s an American TV show called “Here Comes Honey Boo-Boo.” Watch it, and tell us if you still have this same opinion.

Dressing nice can go a long way even if someone isn’t naturally beautiful. Even Hollywood bombshells can look kinda blah and ordinary when they are just wandering around without makeup.

I’m old enough to have seen enough flesh to know that I often would rather a woman keep a few clothes on than take it all off when the moment is right. Clothes can convey an attractive attitude even when other things are missing.

Geeky asians are alright if they are cute.

Are there any other kind?

‘Geeky’ is a pleonasm in this context.

That reminds me of the whole equal pay discussion. They did a large survey of entry position salaries of recent graduates at my business school which showed that the female graduates make quite a bit less in their first jobs. Mandatory outcry ensued.

When examining the reasons they found that female students mostly pick specialisations like HR and marketing while male students mostly go into finance and accounting. Were women somehow forced into these fields that pay less? Apparently not because the follow-up poll showed that this was mainly because the gals preferred to work rather with people then with numbers.

I am inclined to blame socialization for most of the perceived differences but I can very well imagine that this is nature not nurture and finance might always be male dominated while the girls take care of HR.

Or maybe not. What do I know…

May I recommend this book? Especially the chapter on the “glass ceiling”.

http://www.amazon.com/Economic-Facts-Fallacies-Thomas-Sowell/dp/0465022030/ref=sr_1_7?ie=UTF8&qid=1378989098&sr=8-7&keywords=thomas+sowell

I will take a look. From what I gather he argues that the perception of a glass ceiling comes from comparing apples with bananas, correct? I found an article that cited this book saying if comparing men and women in exactly the same situations, there is in fact no glass ceiling at all. Dunno if that is true but what I do know is that it is damn hard to find a female that is nice to look at and interested in finance at the same time.

How much talent was there amongst the men at the conference Spunboy? Any hot guys catch your eye? How would you rate yourself on a scale of 1-10?

I get the point about choosing professions that pay less, but it’s also unclear whether women are paid less because they predominantly go into those specializations or whether these specializations pay less because they are more selected by women (particularly if that means the supply of labor for these positions is higher).

On the one hand, I think it was Margaret Mead who noted that some societies switch roles for men and women (more female dentists in Russia than the US, for example), but the constant seems to be that when women are in the role, it’s considered a less prestigious profession than when men are in it.

On the other hand I have also heard a point from a woman executive who was pro-feminist but looked back on her career of managing both men and women and said that in her many years of leading teams, precisely zero women had come and asked her for raises, whereas many of the men did. I can see that it could be this aspect that may be dragging down the curve. Women may simply not be bargaining as hard as men do, whether because they feel it’s less “nice to do” or possibly because they feel they have (or perhaps actually have) less leverage.