Trading

Banks struggle to break up trading floor boys’ club

An image problem, the difficulty of making work flexible and the rise of quant trading are making the gender diversity quest an uphill battle

Banks struggle to break up trading floor boys’ club

Around five years ago Becci McKinley-Rowe, head of UK equity sales at Morgan Stanley, spoke to a group of 18-year-old women at a careers event who told her that they would never pick trading as a career. Instead they wanted to go into law or management consulting.

“The penny dropped. They had already made up their minds,” McKinley-Rowe said, adding that they had already formed a negative picture of what they would experience.

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