there's no crying in baseball

i wouldn't count meeker as a success story.

Yeah I don't really know why you would want to grind it out in banking because it sucks. Most women probably don't want to make the sacrifice of missing so much quality time with their families. Not saying men ENJOY making that sacrifice but it probably comes down to the social norms of men wanting to provide and feeling responsible for working hard. A lot of it is just personal choice. I don't think the work environment is as sexist as people on the outside think. The retail group on my floor is headed by a woman, there are many female associates in that group, in fact the split at all levels is probably weighted towards women. I know tons of girls in my analyst class and they perform as well as the guys so I don't it's obviously not a "women are being screened out" issue. I would assume it's self selected. Additionally, having worked in banking I can tell you that in order to do this business for numerous years you HAVE to enjoy the day to day in order to be fulfilled. The money isn't going to do it, especially in this downturn and for the hours you're giving up, especially if you are post MBA / later in your career than just fresh out of undergrad, you are giving up a lot of the years that many women would be using to "find their spouse." I think a lot of women probably have marriage / kids in the back of their mind and don't want to try to juggle that with having a job as time consuming as banking (not saying it can't be done).

As to your point about a one month leave that's absurd. You will definitely take more time off than that, and if you don't there's something wrong with you. You should want to take that time and in fact you deserve that time to be with your new child. Women who have just had children are basically untouchable... I know this because we had an associate who took plenty of time off and no one gave her any flack for it, and they were happy when she came back because she came back when she was ready.

the reason men dominate banking is that men dominate everything. this is something you are going to have to live with whatever career you get into.

once you hit 30 you will find that children and family are more satisfactory than increasing the leading digit in your net worth. you are all mostly young and have no conception of your mortality. once you get older though, however financially successful you are, once that feeling hits that you have no one to leave it to, you'll know what it means to stare into the great existential abyss.

so do this for a few years to get it out of your system, meet a man, pop out some brats, and find meaning through your children and not some bullshit career clerking for wall street financial gangsters.

The few women bankers I know have all been fired upon pregnancy. Obviously, the banks didn't come out and say that, but it was certainly the real reason.

The last place I worked had discriminatory hiring practices against women. There weren't a lot of female candidates to begin with, but we interviewed a woman age about 25 and everyone thought she was intelligent and qualified. The final verdict was from the department head who said, "No, she will probably want to do the mommy thing in a few years and we don't have time for that." There you go, it happens. The few women the firm did have in senior positions were all mercenaries that most of the men hated working with.

I've never done banking, but the only women I know in finance work in sales. I don't think I have ever met one at another hedge fund. I'm sure they exist, but it starts to thin out pretty quickly by the time you hit entry + 2 level jobs.

No additional insight from me other than the pic made me LOL.

i added the photo.... though can't take all the credit - google suggested "female monkey from planet of the apes" as i was typing in "female monkey"

idk she's kinda cute, in a furry cuddly kinda way. next female-banker thread i'll dig deeper into female monkey photos

Your second question is basically the answer to your first question!

You don't consider being a top Internet Analyst at MS and now Partner at Kleiner Perkins to be a success story?

Tough crowd!!

Lots of girls in sales and most of them fucking hot.
Don't dip your pen in company ink, they told us though...

Why do women pass on IB? Because getting a job in banking is admiting one of two things, one your getting hired for your tits for a sales job, or two you are so unattractive you would rater spend your time in an office 100 hours a week.

very nice pic lol
Female monkey rocks

Rufio mentioned something that I think is pretty relevant to your question. You really have to enjoy your peers and group (sans the pre deliverable scramble where everyone is stressed // furious at each other), e.g. shooting the shit, going out together, etc., to really stick it out. In some of the more "bro" or "fratty" groups it could be a little tougher to connect when the guys are talking about....well, guy shit.

I personally like having chicks in my group, helps me remember that females actually do exist and I'm not living on a planet completely filled with penises. I will say, most of the girls I've worked with seem to have a tougher time dealing with the stress and hours. Not that they can't perform, it's just seem like they tap out quicker for this thing girls call "me time" (whatever the fuck that is). Also - and I pretty sure this is fact - if you're a hot white chick, you're going to get staffed much less; just science. I mean if were a staffer and it was a Friday night, had to have some pages that needed to be knocked out by 9:00 AM next day and it was between Tommy Chan who's on 3 other deals and pretty white girl that I caught cruising Nordstrom.com during a call that day...sorry Tommy, get the KY Jelly out and get me my fucking pages, pretty white girl, go party it up with your friends at Bowery Electric or something. Just me.

LOL at Stringer Bell's comments

that's very true... girls in finance are just for others to look at... that's the biggest value proposition... other than that... help fellow co-workers get into clubs by balancing out the ratio slightly

I just got a chill. Chicks like that are fucking terrifying.

This made me laugh out loud. Why the only kind of ambitious women that are worth considering are the ones who are ambitious about their bodies.

Bi-winning!!! LOL.

Regards

She must be hot...else her opinion wouldn't matter.

J/K...mostly.

Regards

pics or you don't exist

Yeah, I kinda dodged a bullet there. I don't feel sorry for her husband... the signs were clear...

haha... seriously though, ambition is fine... a woman can be ambitious without being a sociopath... just look at the other girls in my earlier post. It's an irrelevant factor for me relationship wise. I'm indifferent about their level of ambition.

My opinion is that the only people willing to stick it out in banking for the long run are those that care way too much what other people think of them. Ultimately, that's the only driver that explains the need to make $1M+/yr at the expense of everything else in your life, instead of $250k/yr as a F500 Senior Director or VP, working 45-50 hours a week, with 5 weeks of vacation that you can actually use.

I can afford a $100k car if I want one, but not a $350k Ferrari. I can afford a nice home in pretty much any community in the country, but not an upper east side penthouse. I can spend $5-$10k a few times per year on a vacation to Europe, Asia, Caribbean, or wherever my wife and I feel like going, but I can't drop $2M on that vineyard in Tuscany. I can buy coach tickets on a major airline (or first class if I really feel likes splurging), but I can't charter that Gulfstream to take us to our destination. We'll probably have $7M-$10M in retirement savings by the time we're 55-57, but I'll never have $100M. The delta between what I can, and can't afford is definitely NOT worth trading the non monetary things I have in my life for more hours of work. I have never really understood how people come to a different mindset.

yeah I know a couple chicks who went into M&A... one got into GS, the other into UBS. I am closer to the GS one, anyway they both were the types who worked their ass off in uni. The one from GS wasn't really smart to begin with, she graduated with a less than stellar GPA (just above 3.0) but I'm sure the interviewer could sense the work ethic in her. She was also quite hot, but wasn't a very outgoing person. I guess she cracked the interviews and made it, now she's in bschool at HWS.

Am sure throughout high school and uni, we have come across girls who are discipline keeners in school. Begin doing their homework the moment it is assigned, outside the profs office waiting to ask him questions etc. They just seem tirelessly busy. I somehow sensed that this attitude is useful in IB, where you do a lot of tireless hours of monkey work but with a smattering of intellect (earned by rote learning) and fruits of labor that pays off in the end.