GUEST COMMENT: Do investment banks only hire attractive women?

Before we start, I have to declare a conflict in the interest of full disclosure to the extent that I am a woman and I do work in investment banking.

However, all false modesty and self abasement aside, I sincerely doubt that I was hired for my looks. I'm perfectly ordinary looking, can scrub up well on occasion given time and enough sleep, but given the rarity of occasions during which those two align, I can't see how it could have influenced my career.

Thinking through my female colleagues and workplace friends over the years, I would say that the vast majority fall into the same bucket as me; neither jaw- droppingly beautiful nor eye-poppingly ugly. So where has the myth that you have to be beautiful to work in an Investment bank sprung up from?

I think it's arisen because anyone who works or has worked on a trading floor can name two or three examples where looks must have been the deciding factor in an employment decision as there is no palpable other reason for these individuals to be there.

The fact that this group represents two or three out of, let's be generous and say, 30 women on a floor is irrelevant. They tend to stand out from the crowd. Partly they stand out because of the very looks we're referring to: often blonde, a bit leggy and with the sort of hair you can punctuate sentences with. Partly they stand out because in the most extreme circumstances, they have no other observable skills and this is, therefore, the determining factor in the creation of the myth.

The most obvious version of this phenomena that I have come across was a woman in a fairly senior business management role who could not use excel, she couldn't represent one number as a percentage of another number and found it extremely challenging when asked to draw a pie chart.

The men on the floor loved her and we gave her a nick name that I will not repeat here (there's a whole other article here on why women are so horrible to each other but we'll draw a veil over that for now).

It is important to understand, therefore, that not all beautiful women would be cited as examples in this category. Some are both beautiful and effortlessly functional and are therefore seen as such.

Investment banking is remarkably single minded when it comes to effectiveness: if you make money or provide an excellent service, that becomes all that matters.

I remember one of the first sales women I ever worked with who was astonishingly beautiful, elegant and with a wardrobe to die for. She was also faster, more flexible of thought and more commercial than her male colleagues. We were all in awe of her client base and her commissions; then we wanted her shoes.

Investment banking tends to bring out extremes as a function of large groups of people sitting cheek by jowl day in, day out. However, despite its many, many oddities, banking remains a career path which, while not suitable to all, gives women a chance to paid as much if not more than their male peers and in which success is measured far more objectively than in a large number of industries.

The beauty myth is just an excuse for gossip.