Anyone like me who began his career in finance in the mid-eighties will remember that, at the time, women in the operations room were viewed with distrust and there were even those who believed that they were not good for the business. Some male executives, then, screened themselves between job interviews focused on the level of "maternal instinct" and the consideration that basically women between children and credit cards could not even aspire to a career in finance.
After graduating, often achieved by studying as was done in those days, in a Team where a woman was the only graduate, she remained the "Miss" while colleagues were presented as the "doctors", so that customers who called thought that the voices women corresponded to the secretaries…
Then there was a moment in the boom of the nineties in which women in finance were able to get out of the classic positions such as research offices, middle/back offices and "sales" roles (such as salesmen with a persuasive voice because "customers like them more ”) and finally landed trader roles both on the secondary and primary bond markets and on the foreign exchange and equity desks, up to operational and then managerial roles in the debt capital market and IPO teams.
We are not going to talk about the difficulties for a graduate girl who had agreed to start with a back office experience as it was almost impossible to move into a front office role in the operations room. The common denominator in Italian finance until the digital revolution of the 2000s and the advent of trading platforms has always been a wage difference between men and women which, with the same experience and educational qualifications, was around 20 to 30%.
The "production" bonuses and bonuses in Italy have never been remotely comparable with those of foreign banks, especially Anglo-Saxon ones, and hence the migration to London of many "talents". Certain figures have always been earmarked for high-level managers, who were 95% men, up until the time of the global crisis. Then, as in all wars, the inevitable loss of resources left more room for women, who in Italian finance began to occupy roles commensurate with their preparation and professional experience, even if the legacy of a certain mentality that did not see good eye on "pregnant" women in operational roles until it was hard to die.
Those years have taught us to lobby more and to create a virtuous chain of involvement in Teams among women. That said, I don't think there are the financial prerequisites in Italy to give space to female cynicism as told in "Equity", a film that sees a young American director of Indian origin, Meera Menon, look for a way to get people talking about her Opera. The film is not comparable to either "The Wolf of Wall Street" or "The Big Short": there is no humor, nor a real introspection of the character and everything remains on the surface.
Then undoubtedly certain easy careers made up of furnished offices with cherry wood desks and the ever-present Ficus Benjamin for special merits and/or friendships have characterized both genres in past eras (and up to the present day), sharing the original fault. But looking at the statistics on the major financial scandals, whose medal table is dominated by traders, allow me to point out that certain attitudes related to greed, ostentation and pride that does not accept losing are more typical of the male mentality, while the female it is more related to a complete home/family/work fulfillment that leaves less room for certain extremes.
Of course, we could write an encyclopedia on the film's references to the difficulty of establishing oneself and having to watch one's back from unfaithful colleagues who out of ambition commit improprieties with greater gusto when a woman is involved, with the complicity of other men. Facts that would never happen if the boss were a man, of course, because no one would dare to doubt his acquired power, even if undeserved (see the chapter "Smoke sellers").
However, in this post-global crisis era that is heading towards secular stagnation, I do not see many spaces or opportunities for the new female recruits and it must be noted that the recent cases that characterize the Italian banking world are harbingers of bad examples of a world of banking finance linked to generations and business methods in which the discontinuity created by a female presence would perhaps have mitigated the harmful effects for future generations.
(Any reference to existing people or to real events is purely coincidental, but there are many of us who can testify to what has been described…).
