Women bankers worry that lockdown will affect their bonuses

With some banking teams (mainly in markets) looking at record revenues, and some (mainly in advisory) heading for a year to forget, the Q2 results stage doesn’t necessarily seem too early in the year to start worrying about the 2020 bonus round. The people who get paid this year will be the ones with a boss who is prepared to dig in and fight for them. And those, in turn, will be the people who have a good “highlight reel” of profitable deals done, and who have put the time in to make sure that the relevant person on the compensation committee is aware of their successes.

This undeniable fact of the industry has always been the subject of some suspicion that it disadvantages women; both as a general feature of a system that rewards loudmouths and self-promoters, and specifically because there’s a widespread and not wholly inaccurate perception that lots of bosses just don’t fight as hard for their female staff. Under lockdown, however, several prominent women in investment banking (speaking anonymously to Financial News) are worrying that the problem will be particularly acute.

This wasn’t how it was meant to be, of course; at the start of the crisis, many thought that by breaking the culture of presenteeism and bringing senior bankers face to face with the realities of organising childcare, the great move to work-from-home might help to kick start a change in the way that working mothers were viewed. However, in many households, it seems to have turned out that locking yourself into a spare room and bolting the door against interruptions to your Zoom calls isn’t really a viable solution. Although there are some positive stories of family teamwork and fathers taking on more responsibility, several of the women interviewed have ended up effectively giving up on the normal working day, and only really starting to address the challenges of finance after 5pm or when the kids have gone to sleep. Many banks have recognised how tough it is and offered additional leave to bankers with caring responsibilities (up to 10 days at Goldman, five at JP Morgan). But as everyone knows, it isn’t the human resources department that’s involved in the bonus conversations.

If you don’t have “a lot of help”, in the words of one interviewee, then investment banking is notoriously difficult to combine with normal family life, for men and women. Most employees deal with this fact by sucking it up, working harder and making it all fit together by sacrificing sleep. According to one syndicate banker, this is what women seem to be doing – late at night, “a lot of people are logged on, but all the mothers are logged on”. The trouble is, of course, that doing all your best work when nobody’s watching is not necessarily the way to a good number at the end of the year. Wall Street is doing its best to redress gender balance – there were a record number of women in the JP Morgan MD promotions – but it isn’t easy.


Daniel Davies – Read more on efinancialcareers.com


 

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