Family value in the pay scale

Bond traders' daughters in London should now be better informed, following the Take Our Daughters to Work Day, co-ordinated by Girlguiding UK, formerly the Guides Association.

Curious young girls came into the office for the day to watch their parents in action at Merrill Lynch, Barclays Capital, the Bank of England and other financial services organisations.

At Merrill, the daughters of 50 of the employees played trading and marketing games and listened to discussions by groups of high-achieving women.

'Women are under-represented in financial services,' says Lucinda Horne, the vice-president in employee communications who organised the event at Merrill Lynch. 'We want to encourage them to think about their career options.'

Daughters at Merrill Lynch were not restricted to thinking about financial services careers, however. The highlight of their day at the bank was a discussion on how to get into television by a presenter of the TV show Pop Stars.

Last year, the girls were treated to similar advice from a presenter of Blue Peter, the long-running BBC television children's activity programme.

Horne says celebrities tend to be more appealing to the daughters than bankers a lot of the girls want to be actresses, dancers and TV personalities.

Jill Porter, 11-year-old daughter of John Porter, a managing director in the treasury division of Barclays Capital, is one of them.

Jill accompanied her father to the trading floor, but concluded that while banking seemed interesting, life in front of the camera would be much more fun. 'Girls are less interested than boys in working on a computer all day,' she says.

John Porter is not troubled by his daughter's lukewarm feelings for banking. Only beginning bond trading at the age of 36, he does not think an early sense of vocation for financial services is necessary. Nor does he encourage his children to follow in his footsteps. Nevertheless, his 13-year-old son is already expressing an interest in the industry.

Porter's son may be on to a good thing. Recent research by Arnaud Chevalier of the Centre for Economics and Education, at the London School of Economics, found that men who go into the same occupation as their fathers earn up to 8% more than those who do not. Sons of legal professionals and financial professionals benefited the most.

Chevalier has various theories about what causes the discrepancy. Fathers might transmit their ability and interests to their children, customers and employers might see the family name as a form of goodwill, and sometimes there is simply blatant nepotism.

There have been plenty of powerful dynasties in banking and recruiters say family ties can play a role at lower levels, too.

They refer openly to 'nepos' and 'referrals', but say the issue of family ties is less significant now than in the past.

Graduate job applicants are less convinced. 'If your parents work in a bank it makes it 100% easier to get in,' says a student at Cambridge University.

Family ties, however innocent and coincidental, are certainly not to be entirely discounted.

However, being a relative of a powerful client of a bank could be more useful. While investment banks have been known to ask their staff to sign contracts specifying that they will not recruit family members, clients are under no such restrictions. A recruiter at a European bank says: 'A director asked us to recruit the son of a Russian client. A deal worth several million pounds depended upon it. The boy didn't speak any English, but a competitor firm had already agreed to employ him. In the end, we said that if the director was prepared to take the boy on himself, it would be OK. He did, and we won the deal.'

Some banks have introduced precautionary systems to avoid such hiring. A recruiter at one US bank says: 'It used to be a real problem. In order to overcome it, we now require that all referrals be approved by the global division head. That tends to put a lot of people off.'

If would-be referrers are not dissuaded this way, the alternative may well be to ensure that the candidates are given some unedifying work experience.

Intentional or not, this seems to have been the case with the Bank of England. One of the girls attending the bank's Take Our Daughters to Work day described her observations thus: 'My mum works in an office, uses a computer, handles papers, writes notes and goes to meetings.' Enough, surely, to put anyone off.