Gendered financial trading

Women and the Underside of Meetings (Part #3)

Less than 5% of financial traders are women compared with some 28% in the broader category of securities and financial services. David L. Swartz and Vera L. Zolberg (After Bourdieu: influence, critique, elaboration, 2005) discuss the implications of the thinking of sociologist Pierre Bourdieu in relation to this, to the effect that:

The gendered performance of trading further illustrates the need for psychoanalytic interpretation. The aggressive practical logic of the pit competition as well as the trading discourse that valorizes and legitimizes it mark the exchange as a quintessentially male theatre, a natural "context" for the performance of male excellence, while women are imagined in this very same context to be naturally unequipped for such activity. Thus, what the practice of trading reproduces behaviorally, the cultural sphere of trader talk reproduces discursively, a reciprocally reinforcing dialectical circuit. (p. 225)

The authors comment on research on the use of sexual metaphors in other sectors (of which strategy meetings would be an example) but suggest the need for further research on the role of a "SuperTrader" (in effect a "Master of the Universe"). Traders use this cultural material to make sense of their world as male in flavour. They argue that:

Such gender performativity is energized by the ego's structural lack. Given the ego's primary function as a a systemic defense mechanism, it necessarily and continually strives towards what is always already impossible: namely to complete itself, to fill itself in, to defend itself against its own original and always threatening structural dis-unity.... [which] implies that the ego itself is symptomatic and that the experience of wholeness is always necessarily a construction (or illusion), it is agreed that the ego is energetically, structurally driven to consolidate the experience of reality. (p. 226)

Clearly from such a perspective, understanding of the promotion and engagement with any form of "globalization" calls for more sophisticated analysis taking account of subjective factors. The argument has been developed by Richard Widick (Flesh and the free market: On taking Bourdieu to the options exchange, Theory and Society, 32, 2003). Personal experience, as a woman, is provocatively offered by Cari Lynn (Leg the Spread: a woman's adventures inside the trillion-dollar boys' club of commodities trading, 2004).

Financial trading might be fruitfully explored as but one form of a more generic understanding of "transactions". The collapse of the financial system might then be understood as exemplifying a degree of collapse in psychosocial transactions generally. It is in this sense that any dysfunctionality in the transactions between male and female can be understood as symptomatic of a profound malaise in transactions between differences, if not complementary "opposites". It would then be no wonder that society is faced with a "clash of civilizations". Framed in this way recent indications of the pay gap between men and women performing the same task within the financial sector can be seen as very significant.

Reporting on research by the Equality and Human Rights Commission, Haroon Siddique (City's 'shocking' gender pay gap revealed in equality report, The Guardian, 9 April 2009) notes that:

Women working full-time in the financial sector earn 55% less a year on average than their male counterparts, with those in some of the most lucrative areas, such as fund management and futures trading, suffering the greatest disparities...with full-time female employees receiving 39% less per hour than men. The pay gap in the finance sector -- already under fire for its role in the current recession -- is approximately double that for the economy as a whole, both on an hourly and annual basis. Women working full-time in so-called auxiliary activities, including fund management, stockbroking and futures trading, suffer the largest pay gap in the financial services sector, earning on average 60% a year less than men.

Among the highest earners in the finance sector, full-time female employees earn 45% less an hour than men, while in the lowest-paid roles women receive 16% less on average.