Female M&A bankers are strangely clustered in these teams
If you're a woman in M&A banking, it seems that you're likely to be at home in some sector teams than others.
A report from recruitment consultant Pretraga Partners analyzed the representation of women in M&A across 42 different investment banking businesses. The results are… Mixed.
Pretraga found that women made up 18.6% of the workforce. However, it also found that their representation is skewed in favour of some teams over others. As the chart below shows, healthcare is the sweetspot.
Why is that the case? Lazo Cetnik, managing director at Pretraga said it's not clear why women are disproportionately represented in the healthcare sector, but it could be related to academic background. "Within healthcare [banking], more people have a pharmacological or scientific background as opposed to finance or economics," Cetnik said. Only a third of economics students are women, the FT reported.
Curiously, it's also the case that women appear to thrive in M&A at Goldman Sachs. Kim Posnett, for example, is a partner at the firm, and its global head of the TMT group. Posnett was also head of investment banking services and head of the TMT group's global internet business before that.
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Less surprising was the skew towards women in the junior ranks. At the banks it surveyed, Pretraga found that 30% of analysts are women, compared to only 6% of MDs. Women constitute 20% of associates, 17% of VPs, and 13% of directors. The more senior you go, the lower their representation.
Women are also more likely to work for big banks than boutiques. Whilst middle market banks and boutiques only have around 15% female representation in their banking teams, big banks had an average female representation of 22%.
That might be because big banks have targets for female representation. However, it might also be because boutiques have a reputation for working hours - aside from at Goldman Sachs, the list of banks by working hours is dominated by hard grinding boutique banks.
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