I’m basically happy with my life. Law school is alright, I think I’m getting better at football, and I live in Swiss Cottage, which is pretty beaut. It’s got Primrose Hill next door and a neat range of coffee vans that make me feel grown up.
There’s just one problem. I’ve been trying to fill my time by writing interviews with interesting professionals, but everyone I contact seems to air me. I don’t take it personally – in fact I respect them for it. They clearly mean business and are no doubt making a lot of coin, and probably eating a lot of sushi in the evenings too. But still – being an interviewer with nobody to talk to is pretty sad. So when my girlfriend, who is a banker, and her friend who is also, guess it, a banker, hit upon the subject of the various difficulties they face working in male dominated offices at dinner on Friday, I realised my time had come. I had found my interviewees. Deep breath.
The first thing we (they) agree on – work is a social experience.
You’re packed in tightly with a bunch of other people. You speak to each other at all hours, exchanging information about the project/model/slide deck of the minute. Most work ends up being teamwork, because the juniors do the seniors’ work. You join the meeting, leave, do your bit, send it in, get it back, do it again, etc. In this ongoing dialogue of feedback, criticism and improvement, we all talk differently. We don’t have a universally shared language everyone uses – in fact, anything goes, pretty much. You could be Marco Pierre White at Harvey’s, bollocking a 24 year old for boiling the date purée, or Oprah Winfrey, showering the stagehands with effusive praise and positive reinforcement (as she surely must). You might get the best out of your team by fostering a stern, disciplined culture, or you might try to build loyalty and group-feeling among colleagues through more open, personal avenues of communication. The point is that people all have different ways they interact with their colleagues, and companies, in turn, develop their own norms too.
This is what businesses mean by ‘company culture.’ They all take pride in their culture, selling themselves on it and pitching it to future employees. Yet really, how we interact at work isn’t something you can’t sum up in ‘Values’ and ‘Culture’ tabs sitting unread in the ‘About Us’ section:
- “The culture here is one where people feel empowered, they take responsibility for their actions, they care deeply about the firm and the progress we make. And we absolutely work as one firm. There are no silos or internal bureaucracies. It’s highly joined up and collaborative”
- “Creativity – we dare to challenge convention and are innovative in our origination and execution”
As we all know, these are the distilled guesses by the company of how it thinks it wants to be seen. None of it gets at what working for that company is really like. In reality, your experience at work depends hugely on who you work with, who your boss is, and your close team members – and the kind of atmosphere they create. Which really, is about how you talk to each other.
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It is obvious but still worth saying – gender is a big part of how we talk to each other. Since both my interviewees (yep) are bankers, we’re talking here about a roughly 80%+ male workplace. “Most of the boys at work don’t need to adapt their behaviour in the office, they don’t need to be different people at work or change how they act…it’s actually quite exhausting to work in a social setting where feedback, praise and conversation are male.” The effect is heightened with the strain that goes into these jobs: one story is told of working until 02:30 on a senior’s pitch, then arriving in the office at 08:00 the next day, walking past his desk and not being even greeted with ‘hello’. By contrast, a female boss from a previous job is mentioned – “tough Russian boss bitch lady who did Physics at Moscow State Uni and would say ‘Oo my Godd, woww, yess!’ when I did research for her”, but at the same time would be forbidding with the men. Simply, having someone at work who talks like you, understands you – can make you laugh – is something boys generally can take for granted and girls can’t. When you find someone like that who is on your side, it’s easier to feel you belong in the workplace.
Part of the problem is that the ‘male’ office culture described here is actually a shorthand. It is not the sum of all individuals in the workplace, or something all men want or create. Instead, it is something that exists outside of the people who make it, and has a force of its own. The downside of this is that there aren’t individuals to pin the blame on. But the upside is that it can be challenged and improved, once the flaws are recognised.
And it should be – because there is also something inherently wrong with these finance-male dominated office cultures. Any culture will suit those who fit in. But a lot of the behaviours that these cultures encourage are not ones that many boys even feel comfortable in either. In particular, the expectation of extremely long working hours combined with the lack of expressed appreciation for the sacrifices people are making in their roles creates an environment that makes most people feel undervalued. One occasion is mentioned – one of the girls in the office, having worked all night with a fever, told her male boss, who said ah, that’s not nice, and then proceeded to tell her to prioritise two tasks. Boys in the office are treated the same way. But you have to think, in these cases, that a bit more support is needed, and that a more caring approach would go a long way. Because really, there is no such thing as ‘male’ or ‘female’ cultures at all. There are just traits that we promote and traits we discourage, and often, the balance can become tipped too far the wrong way.
“It might look like the girls are all fitting in with the boys in the office and at the pub but really they are having to fit themselves into this place where the base expectation of how we behave is set by boys.” This isn’t anyone’s fault. The difficulty with these problems is that they are structural – “these people are very nice to me and would be horrified to think they are misogynistic: and they aren’t, there just aren’t many women around, and I hadn’t quite realised how different men and women are.” As a girl, the workplace just feels more hostile – less like somewhere you really belong. Few women will thrive in these conditions, and the ones who do will likely do so by adapting their personality to fit in. As a result, the girls in these companies are often more impressive than the boys – more aware of the need to prove their toughness and ability to fit in.
The girls are the big loser from this. But in second place is the company. The drudge work juniors (‘analysts’) do isn’t really the job. The real job is what the senior associates do: it’s about relationships, people and deal creation. In the end, by subtly pushing women away, the finance industry is missing out on the relationships with female-led companies in the rest of the economy, where finding senior women is more common.
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How might some of these problems be tackled?
1 – “HR should do the lame shit like personality quizzes, because the boys will all laugh at it, but then someone will notice that all the girls are over *here*, and the boys are right over there.” Hopefully, this will alert seniors to the importance of thinking hard about people skills. Finance is all about getting the numbers right, but to do that, your team has to be onboard, feeling a sense of loyalty and belonging that fuels the Monday night 3am’s.
2 – Powerful senior women. Knowing there’s someone important in the office who’s on your side, who can make you laugh, who might share genuine interests and understand how you talk is heartening. Working for female bosses is more likely to make girls feel they belong.
3 – Girls should be made more comfortable in untangling the personal from the structural, and noticing when problems with fitting into a culture aren’t just personal to them. It shouldn’t be something that’s too uncomfortable to say. HR departments can only do so much – the team leaders in each department need to care about the fact that girls don’t fit in, and educate themselves on why that may be. It’s good for morale and its good for business.
And with these measly offerings my thoughts on office culture draw to a close. I’ve tried to tie up some ideas shared over 30-ish minutes on Friday and have not done them justice. If nothing else, the exercise was engaging.
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