Sexism and the City

Nigel Farage believes discrimination against women no longer exists in the City. Earlier this week he told an audience that although the environment in the City was “deeply sexist” when he first started working there in the 1980s, “I don't believe that in the big banks and brokerage houses and Lloyds of London and everyone else in the City... there is any discrimination against women at all.”

Mr Farage, in the words of financial analyst Louise Cooper on the Daily Politics Show: "you are talking out of your bottom." True, things have progressed markedly from the 80s, but given that women had only recently been allowed to enter the Lloyds of London underwriting floor back then, it’s a fairly low bar to pass. When the FTSE100 began in 1984, none of the CEOs of the UK’s biggest companies were women; today 4 per cent are.

For Farage, such figures are not evidence of discrimination but of women’s tendency to choose family life over their careers. “In many, many cases, women make different choices in life to the ones that men make simply for biological reasons," he said. If they take time off work when they have children they are “worth less to the employer” when they return, he said, since they will have lost their client base.

It’s true that women are more likely to take time off work when they have children than men. This probably has less to do with biological determinism and more to do with the fact that employment law enforces it—men are entitled to two weeks of parental leave and women up to a year, though this is set to change in 2015—along with a multitude of other factors such as upbringing, social pressures and the fact that the average woman will earn less than her male partner.

But let’s give Farage the benefit of the doubt. Let’s assume that, for “biological reasons” (he gave no further details) women are more likely than men to focus on family life, at the expense of work. Is this what’s holding them back in the workplace?

I left university in 2011. Many of my female friends have since begun careers in the City working in banking, law, insurance, accountancy and other professions. They are in their early to mid twenties, all career-focused, mostly single, with no intention of having children any time soon (or ever, in some cases). Yet one friend went for a job interview only to be told: “This is a team of 10 men. I’m not sure you’d fit in.” Another was told by a colleague that he could not respect women at work, and another that she might find financial work “a bit more difficult.” When one was hired into a company in a group of eight—seven women and one man—people kept asking, baffled, if the company was trying to meet quotas; yet if the ratio had been the other way round, no one would have batted an eyelid.

113 people won sex discrimination cases against their employers in 2012/13, with more than £1m paid out in total compensation. These represent only the incidents of discrimination that were proven to the required standard in a court of law. You can bet your bottom dollar there were many, many more that were settled out of court, could not be proven or weren’t reported.

In a recent FT survey half of female staff in fund management said they suffer harassment or regular sexist behaviour at work, with anecdotal evidence suggesting some women have left the industry as a direct result. The gender pay gap is even higher in the City than across the economy as a whole.

Then there is the discrimination that slips under the radar altogether: studies have shown time and time again that when presented with identical CVs, employers are more likely to select male candidates—not because of any conscious discrimination on the part of the employer but because of a whole network of background assumptions about the abilities of men and women that informs the decision-making. Such things are more or less impossible to prove on a case by case basis, but show up clearly when looking at trends within large groups.

To say that discrimination against women no longer exists in the City is to ignore all of this. The changes to parental leave due to come into force in 2015 are hugely important; at least the law will no longer reflect discriminatory attitudes towards women. The attitudes themselves, though, are harder to change. Farage is right to say that things have improved since the 80s, but we shouldn't satisfy ourselves with that—sexism in the City, as elsewhere, is alive and well.