Interesting post about women in the finance industry

[maryjanell79]

Hey all,

Just read this post on how womens role in the finance industry has changed in the past 2 generations.

www.rplan.co.uk/post/1280/women-in-finance-the-past-50-years

I think we have come a long way. Especially those who can juggle high powered jobs and a family! (Hats off to them as that is no small task!)
However I get the feeling we still have a long way to go in the finance industry.

What is everyone elses thoughts on this post?

Applauds stillsquifgy!

Entirely concur, StillSquiffy. The rate of attrition once women have had kids is shockingly high. It's such a terrible loss of talent and skill. And from the employers' side, investment in their people.

I seriously believe that if one organisation (in whatever City field) got their act together in terms of making the workplace somewhere where you could continue to be a contender post-kids/working part-time, they would wipe the floor with their competitors.

SS< I do disagree. IN a free market women like I am who often choose to work 50 weeks a year and often 6 or 7 days a week (and men for that matter) ought to be free to do that. Just because a load of people like to sit around drinking or eating cakes or scrubbning the floor does not mean those that love their work and like doing it should have to be limited by that.

Perhaps we need to fnid out why women want to be home wiping a baby's bottom rather than doing work they love? Is it because their husbands are not doing enough of the baby bottom scrubbning so it's lal fallen on mummy or was mummy brought up by a housewife in a sexist way and conditioned from birth to think she has to be with her chidlren a certain % of the time?

Perhaps we need to fnid out why women want to be home wiping a baby's bottom rather than doing work they love?

Could it possibly be because they feel they are the best ones to bring up their own children? Just a suggestion....

I think most working fathers and mothers think they bring up their own children. You don't pack them abroad for 10 years when you work. Husbands bring up children surely or do you massively denigrate the role of your spouses? Surely the father brings them up even if he works and the mother for that matter.

Xenia,half of the stuff you write is brilliant.Your posts on entreprneurs for example,even if I dont always agree with absolutely everything.
But half of what you write always comes back to your own personal choice of having a nanny for the first 10 years of your childrens life.
You made the choice.Fine.
You may or may not like the choice you made,again fine.
people make other choices,should be fine,but you have an issue with it,not fine.

I have only been on MN for this year.Many others have been on MN for far longer and must be heartily sick of your own issue with this subject.
I think it is time to call you on it everytime you manage to bring any posts on feminism,and sometimes on education around to the same thing,whether you started the post,or even worse,someone else started it.

Agrees with amillion but would like to add the "and not all parents could afford to choose a nanny which doesn't make them unsuccessful and/or stupid" refrain.

Yay for Still squiffy - thats exactly what needs to happen! I feel you can give far more to a job when working sensible hours. Of course people who wish to work longer hours may do so, but I have seen it work much better with two people splitting it. In my line of work 80hr weeks have been the norm for many years, and only recently have people started to put their collective feet down and demand less. I have on occassion worked over a hundred hours in a week. I now work a 42hr week, and I know I work much better when I am at work. My work load in my working hours is busier, but I give far more of myself now than I did, when I am at work, and do not resent it.

Husbands bring up children surely or do you massively denigrate the role of your spouses? Surely the father brings them up even if he works and the mother for that matter.

Of course they do. I mentioned women solely because I was responding to a point you made specifically about women. Had you said men and women, then I would have also said men and women.

And of course working parents bring up their children. Again my response was tailored to your point about "wiping babies' bottoms" i.e. the mundane necessities. Some women prefer to do these chores themselves rather than hand them over to others as they see this as "bringing up children".

Not a view I personally agree with, but I was trying to put myself in another person's shoes and understand why they might feel that way even if I don't.

Just noted an earlier point Xenia made - perhaps if you had been a stay at home mum you would be aware that there is a lot more to it that 'drinking and eating cake' - it is far more difficult than many jobs - occasionally I get a dinner break at work for example, and often someone has time to make me a cuppa. You dont normally get time as a stay at home parent to scrub the floor. Not everyone has the luxury of paying someone to do these things for them. (Nor would I want to if I could) Nor is that a mark of 'lack of success' - it is just normal.

I have done more hours of childcare than just about any other mother on mumsnet. If anyone knows what being a stay at home mother would be like surely I will in year 27 of motherhood and a large family.

I have never said it was a nice job at home unless you marry a rich man who pays for a cleaner and nanny. it's such a boring dull job that very few women want to do it unless they are so low paid and uneducated that they have no choice.

I am a very intelligent woman who absolutely loved being a full time Mum - and I loved changing my kids' nappies. Odd? But true - touching their skin, smelling them, all of it, I loved it. It was the most difficult and rewarding job I have ever done. Now it's nearly over, I am back in a career and enjoying that too. Women are allowed to like different things you know. I applaud those of you who work 50 weeks a year and own islands - marvellous! But please don't be rude to the rest of us because we wanted and enjoyed different things.

And, yes, some of it was cake - and jolly nice it was too. What a very lucky, varied life I have had!

I love my work, work very hard (60 hour weeks are normal) and after 4 degrees can objectively class myself as "not that stupid." I am also terribly, terribly badly paid. I can't afford a nanny for my toddler, can only afford daycare and babysitters because my husband (a teacher!) is the big earner in our household at the moment, and also does more childcare outside of the usual working day, so I can be at my desk in the office at home.

Being a lecturer at a university is long hours for little money with terrible job security (many lecturers and professors don't know from term to term if they'll be employed.... you can't live like that if you have bills to pay, children to raise, etc). I have absolutely loved, loved, loved it. And I can't make ends meet. I don't have masses of debt, I too drink tap water and bike everywhere, and the truth is, I'm changing careers to something more 'businessy' because I can't meet my obligations/responsibilities on an adjunt's pay, and the tenured professorship of yore is now something like a legend.

So: My job pays so badly I am changing careers after nearly 9 years of training and working very hard to get where I am today. 1 of my degrees is from oxbridge, 1 from an ivy league institution, I have glowing references and amazing teaching evaluations from students who cried when they couldn't get into my next class after a semester with me.

And do you know what? I really wish I could have spent more time at home with DS when he was a baby. I went back to work at 6 weeks. I had no choice: work and my visa status and my health insurance required it. I had one crying fit in the shower then got on with things, and I reckon DS has turned out about fine actually .... but it wasn't my 'sexist husband' or my 'sexist upbringing' or my lack of ambition, education, or native intelligence that made me want to spend more time with him as a baby: it was the fact that he was such fun to be around, and that time felt terribly short.

What's done is done: I love working and will always work, I expect. Not least because we can't afford not to work. But this "only stupid people want to be at home with their children all the time'' nonsense cannot go unchallenged. I didn't want to give up working forever. I would have liked more than 6 weeks, and even now, when DS wants Mummy to do bathtime and stories , but Daddy does it because Mummy has to work in her office .. even now I miss him and wish I had less work to do.

So I think that one can be intelligent, educated, ambitious and eager to pursue a career after childbirth and still want to spend some time at home with one's children, while they are very young. I don't see this intense polarity that you are positing, Xenia - it may be your experience but it hasn't been mine, and I think your reasoning is flawed when you assume that those who don't aspire to your model are inadequate in some way.

Waves a flag at balckcurrants and cheers! As well as agreeing with what you say about being with children , I also think you have made an important point that women who work outside the home choose their job/career for all sorts of reasons, the primary one of which may not be huge financial reward. Deciding to work in a career that is rewarding in ways other than financially does not make someone stupid! However, I'm sorry that you had to alter your carrer path as a result, blackcurrants, there is whole new debate there about the sort of things that are really valued (ie given high finacial reward) in society and what that says about society's priorities.

I am going to guess that 5 women a week on average tell Xenia that they enjoy being at home with the children.Xenia has been on here every week,and has been since at least 2006.
So that is 5 women a week,for 52 weeks a year,for 6 years.
So 5 times say 50 times 6. That is 1500 women over 6 years who have said that they want to be at home looking after their children,many of whom have been high powered women.
And still she doesnt get it. Remarkable, for such an intelligent woman as Xenia.

I suspect that shows that we might encourage children who adore their academic subject to become City accountants or lawyers and save it as a hobby. Good example Jonathan Sumption (now Supreme court judge) who is also a historian en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Sumption His last job was on the Abramovitch case as barrister fee rumoured to be £1m.

I think I'm reasonably knowledgeable in my subject (wrote 30 books etc) and I like it but I am not an academic in it. I think we all know just about all forms of teaching are pretty badly paid although sometimes it is a kind of consultancy (something I was doing yesterday in the Midlands which in sense was teaching was quite well paid)

I would add that more fool women if time after time they follow their heart and then regret it and spend 20 years on credit crunch threads trying to make ends meet. Ensure your daughters do not rely on men for money and pick decent careers rather than being muggins mum on very low paid because society and sexism foists her into those low paid fields whilst encouraging sons to earn a lot.

Xenia,did you follow your heart?

Xenia that only holds true if there were never any jobs in academia. Actually, There were lots, right up to 2008, when the majority of US universities suffered terribly in the financial crash (the private research ones, who fund themselves through endowments) - and suddenly instead of 30 tenure track jobs in my field to apply to, there were 3, or maybe 8. The numbers haven't gone up since then. It was always highly competitive but I have always been a great, highly competitive candidate. Now there simply aren't the jobs.

I didn't sign up to be a starving artist in a garret, hence I am changing careers. But to say that I 'followed my heart' and am now 'muggins mum on very low pay' is nonsense. There were good jobs in the field when I begun training, then the world changed and now there aren't any. Hence I am getting out.

But you neatly sidestepped my point, which was that despite my cleverness, my ambition, and my desire to work and have a fulfilling career, I wanted to spend time at home with my son when he was a baby because I found that time delightful.

Of course you ignored it, since it doesn't fit into your world narrative that only stupid women want to play with babies.

I know some parents can afford to in terms of long term career sacrifice because they are married to rich spouses or for whatever reason and they choose to. I love babies. I had loads and had and have very close times with the children every day but I think about 2 or 3 hours a day is about as much as I like. Any more and it is a bit boring. Most adults are the same and indeed most men. It may depend on the child of course.

Giles Coren in today's times writes that his baby sleeps 12 hours solid every night with an hour's nap from 1 - 3. I never had one of those. We had the baby, 1 year old and 3 year old all up a lot every night.

I accept the point that thnigs change. I have adapted and do various different things in terms of earnings and that was always so. If I look at the impact of the 1920s crash on my grandfather and his siblings from their letters I can see how it affected them and how they had to adapt. In the UK being a lecturer is like being a school teacher, low pay for life, difficult to afford school fees and buy a house and it has always been and always be so which is why a lot of ours went over to the USA to make a bit more money.

Xenia,you married "down" you have previously said,and followed your heart.Do you regret it?

blackcurrants,thank you so much for your post on several levels.
it has also helped me to realise that that is what Xenia does.I have ben trying to puzzle her out for months.
She has a narrative,actually many narratives in her head.
Whereas most people search for the truth in life,Xenia searches for anything and everything to uphold her many narratives.

Xenia that's why I relocated to the USA in my early twenties; when I decided to pursue this as a career I decided that I deserved to be paid in a manner that recognized my intelligence, training, experience and expertise. Now things are changing, I'm moving on - not the end of my world, but certainly an indication that you can be very clever, very hardworking, very ambitious, and poorly paid despite your best laid plans.

I agree with you about loving babies. I know you've had a big family (not something I'm planning, but then I started on mine 10 years older than you were I think) but I'm certainly having another one. You say you get bored of them after 2-3 hours. I think I probably get bored of them after 6-8 hours. (It helps that they sleep a fair bit in the day, so you get to read, do other things). But my boredom threshold is somewhere between three and four times yours when it comes to babies. Does that make me three to four times less intelligent, hardworking, and ambitious than you? (an argument I hear a lot from you, about why working mothers are great) Or maybe it makes me three to four times more patient, nurturing, and loving than you? (an argument I hear a lot on MN from people who think stay at home parents are great) ..... well, I think neither. I know I am extremely intelligent, ambitious, hardworking and whatnot. I am sure you are very loving and nurturing mother. I think one of us just likes spending time with babies for longer than the other one.

That's it. Not a judgement on character, intelligence, ambitions or hard work. A judgement on what you enjoy, and what you're good at.

I think it's fine that you do what you do. I don't think it makes you more anything than me, apart from different. And I think that's fine.
There, I suspect, you and I differ greatly.

Blackcurrants, what excellent posts.

No of course it doesn't. I suspect part of it might be number of children. If you haev 3 under 4 as we did and no domestic help and work full time then when you are with the children there is quite a bit to do. you are not sitting in wonder staring into the eyes of a one single child for 2 hours and then hoover a small flat when it's asleep. Instead you are doing a sort of constant damage limitation exercise and you have one baby strapped to a sling on your front whilst you try to vaccuum the floor whilst the toddler kicks your leg.

My post about the barrister Sumption who is an historian too... the Abramovitch case is over and he won - he supposedly has the biggest brain in the UK so now the other Russian who sued has to pay the costs. Sumption's fee is not the £1m I mentioned above it's £8m. What fun. All good news for Britain's poor as a lot of tax will result from all this. We must work hard to keep Britain as a financial centre and attract people here. Pity it was a Mr Sumption not a Mrs though.. what a shame.

Good news for Britain's poor.......that one individual earns £8m