Fortune: Wall Street Has Never Had A Woman CEO. Why Not?

Data from Oliver Wyman’s Women in Financial Services data was featured in a Fortune story titled, “Wall Street Has Never Had a Woman CEO. Why Not?”

Before the recession, several women looked as possible contenders for the CEO role. Yet a decade later banking still doesn’t have one woman chief executive.  The article looked at the possible reasons why and explored if women leave the industry at mid-point in the careers. 

According to Oliver Wyman a “mid-career conflict” is especially problematic for women in the field. Women start out with the same ambition level as men. They retain that ambition for the first few years of their careers, and they have similar ambition later in their careers. It’s the middle that’s troublesome.

At that stage, women “vote with their feet,” according to Oliver Wyman study and are more likely to leave their financial industry jobs than their male colleagues and are more likely—by some 20% to 30%—to exit versus women in other industries. That trend emerges at a time when women ages 30 to 50 are less willing to sacrifice their private lives for the sake of their jobs, a shift in attitude that doesn’t show up nearly as strongly among men. 

To read the entire article, please click here.