I’ve been on this blank page so many times before. Writing a sentence, and then deleting it all and trying to forget about it for a few months.
I should probably preface this by praising the fact that I now am working in videogames, and most importantly in a company that very much has inclusivity as the forefront of their values. But before working for this (great) studio, I used to work in finance. As a lot of people will try to convince you, not the “Boring old” finance, but rather the “cool, forward thinking” fintech. As a woman, no matter how you wrap it, it’s still finance.
I’m sure that, earlier this year, as the gender pay gap report came out, it wasn’t much of a surprise to hear that the Finance sector was one of the worst offenders:
So talking about how predatory and sexist the industry is won’t be a surprise, right? 2017 came by, and with it, the #MeToo movement. I was sitting in the shadows, a little scared to share my story, waiting for everyone else’s to come out about the financial industry, and watch it burn from a distance. But nothing happened.
Here’s the truth: Everyone in Finance is so used to this old, backwards way of thinking that it has become the norm. Woman don’t seem to think of complaining about being mistreated, because it’s expected.
I was the same when I first arrived in the industry. Fresh out of working in reception and face to face customer service, I went in Finance full of hopes and dreams. And it was all working out ! Very shortly after having worked in Customer Service, I was promoted into a role as an Operations Administrator. Doing B2B customer support, learning how to speak XML to troubleshoot issues with the integration of the payment platform, doing Salesforce admin,… I was being taken seriously, and my tech skills were acknowledged. Hurrah!
Our compliance team didn’t accept having a woman working on the tech side as much though. One of the first emails I got to send to them to check on one of our partners was received with a simple request:
I’ll give you the information you need if you show me a good time at the Christmas Party!
I laughed it off. Shared it with colleagues, considered going to HR, but was told not to overthink it, after all this was just “banter”. Banter that was repeated many times after that.
Then there was the “lad” of the office, that would basically hit on anything that moved. You would be having a conversation with a colleague and he would walk past and make a comment on how you’d make a cute lesbian couple. Comment on peoples outfit. Stare at your chest when you were asking him work-related questions. But worst of it all, his way to hit on women — colleagues — outside of work was with alcohol. That is, giving you as many shots as humanely possible until you were drunk enough to let him make out with you, no matter how much you said no to it. At which point his friends — also colleagues — would laugh it off. None of these situations were ever considered worthy of being brought out to HR, they were none of their concerns after all, right? I was the FNG and I just had to learn how the office worked.
These are the worse examples. But there are so many more mild ones. Every single office I worked at, no matter how experienced I’d become, would have most everyone speaking to my male counterpart to ask them questions about projects I was currently working on. To this day, I’ll still interject to reply to questions that someone asks my manager, out of habit !
I got hired for roles I was grossly overqualified for, but sold the job as a lot more technical than it was in reality. Then there was this job where, on my first week, a colleague asked me if I had a friend that was “exactly like me, but single” (I didn’t stay much longer after that!). I fought to get given more tasks as I wanted to be more challenged, but would be given the easier jobs, the more “visual” rather than technical issues to resolve. This meant I was sheltered from tasks that would allow me to grow within the business. Trying to challenge salary reviews or ask for more during contract negotiations would most of the time be met with contempt, as if I should be thankful for what I’m given rather than being allowed to strive for more. In my very last job in the industry, I was promised an ever evolving role in a start up company where I’d start as Operations Manager, with a promise to move into the Head of Operations role once we started hiring the Ops team. Less than a month after starting, that very same role was given to a friend of the COO, who immediately emailed me to let me know I should be emailing him directly for any queries/complaints about my position in the company.
At the end of the day, this was the reality: I always had to work twice as hard to prove myself compared to a male colleague who was assumed to be working hard from the get go.
I’m not just here to complain. My hope with it is that it will make an impact on at least another woman, and give her the courage to share her own. As much as Fintech puts on a “Fast, forward-thinking, modern and open industry” face, they absolutely are engrained in their own old, cliche ways. It’s absolutely fucking time it grows up.
