You only have to glance at execs these institutions promote to the vaunted managing director position each year. These pages cover the annual “MD class” from the majors precisely because it’s the career-making zenith for every aspirational investment banker.
There were 19 new managing directors named in Australia across Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Citi, UBS, Bank of America and JPMorgan recently. Here’s an alphabetical list: Aaron, Alastair, Amardeep, Bernard, Chris, David, Gavi, Jim, Ladislav, Luke, Matthew, Michael, Paul, Pedro, Peter, Phil, Rowan and Tim.
Plus one woman: Nicole Beavan over at Goldman.
Good on the banks’ HR teams (likely predominantly women) who wheeled out bosses to quote their way out of all this. UBS Australia chief Nick Hughes stepped up to say the bank’s pay gap would only “be narrowed by increasing the number in leadership and higher-paying roles”.
“Our execution strategy is focused around three simple actions: hire more women, retain more women and promote more women,” Hughes said.
UBS named two blokes in its 2024 MD class. In 2023, it was two men and two women, while the year before, four men and one woman. What would UBS analysts say about the execution of Nick’s strategy?
Rather than trot out these talking points, we’d love to hear from an honest banker. “Yeah, you know what, our gender gap’s bad. But we hire women who want to do 100-hour weeks when they’re younger, then for whatever reason, most don’t rise up through the ranks. It could be babies, or a sexist boss. Or it could be that they don’t want to waste their evenings going drinking or to the rugby. Buddy, I don’t even like rugby!”
Investment banks with the worst gender pay data are in a negative feedback loop, structured around insane lifestyles that disincentivise women, or more importantly help men win work from other men. Perhaps the first firms who start tearing that down will keep more upwardly mobile, ambitious women. Or they’ll find themselves losing out on deals. Either way, you can’t be what you can’t see.
Source: afr.com
