Banks would dearly love to hire female technologists, but they're few and far between
Gender discrimination in banking has come under the spotlight again, largely thanks to Financial News' series about just how thick the glass ceiling is for women.
Within financial technology there's a different issue - banks would like to hire more women, but there simply aren't enough of them around.
New research from recruiters Greythorn points to how, while sex discrimination is rife within IT generally, the financial sector is by far the worst - just 13% of the workforce are women, it suggests.
"It's clear that women face an even larger barrier of discrimination when going for the most high-profile and lucrative jobs," said Paul Winchester, managing director of Greythorn.
Maybe so, but at the junior level at least, some banks are attempting to bring more women on board. JP Morgan, for instance, runs events aiming to attract more graduate women specifically to IT roles, as does Goldman Sachs.
And, given the choice, banks are more likely to hire a women over a man with similar skills and experience in order to increase their diversity quota, suggest headhunters.
"They won't hire a lesser candidate just because she's a women, but an application from a senior, experienced and highly skilled female technologist is definitely viewed more favourably," says Paul Bennie, director of IT in finance headhunters Bennie MacLean.
While most industry bodies extol the virtues of flexible working arrangements to ensure women don't have to choose between work and family, practically speaking, this can count against you.
"In reality, if a woman is given a flexible working arrangement, this can still be viewed as slacking off by their male peers, which is not viewed favourably when it comes to promotion, especially if they're judged purely on delivery," says another financial technology headhunter. "This is one of the reasons why there are so few senior female financial technologists."
There are of course, some senior financial technologists - Natasha Davydova at Deutsche Bank, Sarah Wilkinson at UBS and Cyndy Yap at Credit Suisse, for instance. Unfortunately, they are still few and far between.
