Investment Banks in Sweden : Careers in a gendered organization culture

Sammanfattning: Gender equality is a much-debated topic today with e.g., EU putting pressure on the labour market through Sustainable Financial Disclosure Regulations (SFDR) and the UN through their Sustainable Development Goals (SDG). However, gender equality is not a simple matter of only distributions and setting goals; it also refers to attitudes, norms, values, and ideals that affect the lives of women and men in society. Currently the labour market is implementing policies and taking initiatives for increased diversity however, women are still lagging behind men and women’s hierarchical advancement is experiencing a slowing trend. One industry with a strong male dominance is the investment banking industry, an industry that has been struggling to increase the gender split. Multiple attempts have been taken to recruit more women, but the industry struggles with retention rates and is still a heavily male-dominated sector. To be able to know which policies to implement it is important to understand how the organization is gendered and to understand its willingness to change. What happens within organizations can also be seen in society, politics, and media. Research on gendered organizations provide visibility and nuance on how gender is created by society. This research has studied how the industry investment banking is gendered and the perspective on change. The study has been conducted through a qualitive method using structural interviews with guidance of Sarah Rutherford’s model on excluding factors. The interviewees were employees on a junior level in the hierarchy, at different investment banks in Sweden. The study shows an industry with multiple cultural aspects that can work as excluding towards women; the long-hour culture, language & communication, work ideology and gender awareness. The study found both a denial and unawareness of the existing gendered process. The junior team themselves were a mix of different resistors: open, hidden and neutral. There was also a strong belief that the inequalities would fade over time and that they were heavily dependent on the gender split rather than the terms and conditions at the workplace.