What Will It Take to Make Finance More Gender-Balanced?

If feminism means being fair to both men and women, then I am a feminist -- though I don't like the bias of the term.

But what actually happens? Every role where men seem to be doing well, an effort is made to promote women, using "outcome based" metric. On the other hand, where women are at an advantage, nothing is done. Eventually, the work environment becomes toxic for men, just as primary schools are already becoming for boys.

I love women and girls. But let's just treat each human being as a unique individual, not as part of a census category.

I moved from a software engineer position in the games industry to a similar one in finance.

My current environment has a better gender balance than my old environment. However, reading CVs of potential candidates for roles on my team, my overall experience is the same as it has been throughout my career: the proportion applying for software engineering positions is low.

Few women apply to join or lead software engineering teams in finance. Few women applied to join or lead software engineering teams in the games industry (the balance on the art team swung the other way, however, and QA was about 50/50). Few women applied to the embedded company I had my first job at. In college, there were over a hundred male students studying the same major in my year, and one (sic) female student. In high school, the computer lab was filled with boys. You have to go all the way back to middle school age to see anything like gender parity.

This is all anecdote, and it's software engineering - I'm sure the situation in other parts of finance will be different.

But I suggest at least part of what is happening happens much earlier in life than the finance institution, and effort must be applied there if we genuinely want to help.

I think the article misses one major factor. What investors want.

I can't see the majority of investors going for a fund headed by a woman over a man. That puts a hard limit on how far they can rise within the organisation.

To be clear I'm not saying its a conscious choice, just that if presented with 2 identical funds, investors will gravitate to the male led one.

I wonder how passive investing will change this though. As the humans increasingly become salesmen rather than actually investing money, will gender become less important?