Morgan Stanley's NY tech chief: "I feel like a sh*tty dad a lot of the time"
If you want to be a good father – or at least an active and involved one – then finance probably isn’t the career path for you. And even trying to make it work can be an uphill battle.
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Patrick Deane, head of capital technology at Morgan Stanley, executive director, and father of three took to social media recently to share some of his struggles with balancing his career and his fatherhood.
“I feel like a shitty dad a lot of the time,” Deane said. “It's hard for me to reconcile: I know that it's the single most important thing in my life. I knew it from the second my first son was born.”
Deane said he'd contemplated leaving banking as a result. In the end, what stopped him from quitting was a disinclination to hang around the house “Parenting is done primarily through the example you set,” Deane explained. “Those of us with kids know they barely do anything we say, but they're constantly watching us and emulating our behaviors. The way I treat my 7-year-old son is the exact way he treats his younger brother.”
Deane thinks your children should see you as a well-rounded person before anything else. “I want them to see a husband, brother, son and friend. I want them to see someone who every once in a while comes home too late, after having too much to drink with his friends, but still goes bowling with them the morning after.”
Leading by example doesn’t mean being an overbearing father. It means being a complete human being who also happens to be a father, as well as a “head of” something or another at a global investment bank.
Seven years ago, we wrote about paternity leave being a “kiss of death” for bankers, and in 2015 Goldman Sachs had generously doubled its paid paternity leave allowance from two weeks to four.
Nowadays, Goldman offers a 26-week paternity leave allowance. And yet, it’s also currently involved in a court case with former compliance VP Jonathan Reeves, in which he alleged that the bank had fired him in 2022 for taking said paternity leave.
Morgan Stanley’s own paternity leave offering is 16 weeks for either parent, as well as six to eight weeks of “additional” medical leave following pregnancy, the wording of which implies that women receive a longer allowance period. The bank also offers you a silver spoon engraved with your child’s name. That may make all the difference.
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