From Silicon Valley to Wall Street – the “Girls Club” is getting smaller

After two years leading the wealth-management division at the nation’s largest bank, Bank of America Corporation, Sallie Krawcheck was let go this week. Krawcheck’s removal was due to “reshuffling of the top ranks” by the company’s CEO Brian Moynihan.  The Los Angeles Times reports “Sallie Krawcheck’s departure from a high-ranking job at Bank of America spotlights a trend on Wall Street: Women, in recent years, have lost their jobs more often than men.” According to Economic Policy Institute, between 2007 and 2010, 12.5% of women in the financial industry lost their jobs, compared to only 8.8% of men.

Dan Fitzpatrick and Liz Rapport from The Wall Street Journal reported on this recent executive removal with their article Financial Firms’ Ceilings. They make note of how this recent removal of a female executive “highlights the difficulties women face in ascending the corporate ranks, both in finance and elsewhere.” This week also saw the removal of Yahoo’s CEO Carol Bartz.

According to Catalyst, less than 20% of finance industry executives are female, yet women make up 47% of the US labor force and more than half the US finance work force. Out of the 20 biggest banks and securities firms in the US none of them have female CEOs.

High-level women on Wall Street are closely watched because there are so few of them, and their departures are well-chronicled.

To read the full Wall Street Journal article, click here>>

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