Who does Goldman Sachs really want to hire? Is it excellent students who’ve spent time studying abroad? - Maybe so. But it’s also women in their late-20s and throughout their 30s.
The Financial Times reports that Goldman Sachs has a dearth of mid-ranking and senior women and that it intends to hire some more. “We’re doing a very good job of hiring women at graduate level but we want to hire more female vice-presidents and managing directors,” Sally Boyle, head of human capital management for EMEA, tells the paper. Historically, Goldman didn’t hire enough women to feed the female pipeline, says Boyle: “When these women were hired as graduates there wasn’t a 50/50 split.”
Goldman doesn’t say so, but it must also have lost some of the women it did hire historically, because it intends to remedy its deficit by trying to hire them back again. – The firm has been hosting ‘alumni dinners’ for its lost women. As we’ve reported previously, it also runs a returnship programme which fast-tracks women who’ve left the firm into vice president positions if they come back to the flock.
Anecdotal evidence from across the banking industry suggests that women quit finance when they’ve had children. Goldman Sachs’ strategy is to woo them back a few years later on. Unlike Facebook, it’s not encouraging female staff to defer child-rearing by paying to freeze their eggs. – At Goldman, the FT says that subsidized egg freezing is only on offer to women who need it for medical reasons like cancer.
Separately, results to the European Banking Authority’s stress tests have become horribly ubiquitous. Unless you’re a FIG banker, banking analyst, or investor in bank stocks, all you really need to know is that to pass the test, banks needed a capital ratio of at least 5.5% in a simulated ‘tough environment’. French banks came out looking good: BNP Paribas would have a capital ratio of 8.07%, SocGen would have a capital ratio of 8.15%. This compared to a mere 6.7% for RBS, but 8.2% for Barclays. Deutsche Bank looked particularly robust, with a ratio of 8.78%.
Meanwhile:
Statistically, female bankers are most likely to quit after seven years. (Financial News)
A branch of the Priory Clinic has opened in the City to help bankers tackle stress. It will be open in the evenings to accommodate bankers’ hours. (Telegraph)
As equity markets turn, more and more IPOs are being cancelled. 2015 may not be so good for ECM bankers. (Financial Times)
Ex-RBS trader reinvents self as football coach. (Bloomberg)
Another Deutsche Bank regulatory specialist with links to the bank’s LIBOR investigation has committed suicide. (Reuters)
27 pre-written templates for awkward work emails. (Daily Muse)
24 hours in the life of your banking boyfriend. (Turney Duff)
Working at Google just gets better and better, claims Google employee. (Business Insider)
How hedge funds have changed. (FinansAkrobat)