The gender pay gap in banking: why women say it persists

efinancialcareers.com:

If you thought men being paid more than women in banking is becoming a thing of the past, then today's revelation that the gender pay gap at Goldman Sachs hasin fact expanded to its widest level in six years, will come as a terrible surprise.

Goldman has yet to publish its actual gender pay report, but widely leaked figures suggest that men, on average, now earn 54% more at Goldman Sachs International (Goldman's London office) than women. Back in 2018, that figure was only 50%.

Get Morning Coffee  ☕  in your inbox. Sign up here.

What's going wrong? The fundamental problem is that women only account for 23% of Goldman's staff for top quartile pay. «We know that we need to do more to increase representation of women at the senior-most levels of the firm,” a spokesperson for Goldman admitted to Bloomberg.

The absence of highly paid women isn't just a problem for Goldman Sachs. It's endemic in the banking industry: at Barclays Execution Services, only 33% of the highest paid people are women. At DB Group Services (UK) Ltd (aka Deutsche Bank), just 21% are. 

One of London's most senior female bankers says the problem is that when banks hire women to bolster their proportion of female employees, they add them to a few specific functions. „All these banks put the men in the big front office roles and then round out their quotas with women in internal functions like legal and HR,“ she says. „The power all stays with the men.“ 

At the same time, women who do try to climb the ladder in front office jobs, say they're continuously overlooked for the top positions. „There are many occasions where male colleagues who were more lazy than me were given information and I was kept out of the loop,“ one female banker told us last year.