The Cultural Wall Women Still Face in Banking
In 2025, Jillian G. Woolf examined gender barriers in banking, looking to give light to intentional or unintentional masculine bias in the financial services industry. Her research focused on why an industry that employs a majority of women still sees men dominate executive and senior management roles.
Woolf’s study was qualitative and industry specific. She conducted 32 semi‑structured interviews with professionals working across six profit‑and‑loss–centric, male‑dominated departments:
- Asset management
- Commercial
- Credit
- Finance
- Financial advisory
- Risk
Using the Gioia methodology to analyze the transcripts, she identified “aggregate dimensions” of cultural messaging that help sustain a masculine‑dominated hierarchy in banking.
Why Women’s Leadership Delivers Measurable Value
Woolf begins by underscoring that women in top management teams (TMTs) provide tangible competitive advantages to banks. Existing research reviewed in her literature section shows that when more women are present on boards and TMTs, banks tend to see:
- Stronger corporate social responsibility performance that enhances reputation
- More disciplined acquisitions, right-sized investment decisions, and more conservative risk postures that reduce vulnerability to crises and volatile markets.
- Lower costs of capital and fewer non‑performing loans, allowing more competitive loan pricing for customers.
Women’s leadership styles — more democratic, more likely to ensure everyone is heard, and more conducive to team innovation — also support product variety and stronger competitive actions such as new products, better pricing, and more successful acquisitions. Despite these documented advantages, the upper echelons of banking remain overwhelmingly male.
A Female Workforce Led by Male Leadership
According to U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission data cited by Woolf, women make up a majority of employees in banking overall, yet they are underrepresented in executive and senior management roles and in board positions. Banking deviates from the broader labor market. Nationally, men hold the majority of jobs, but in banking, women do. Nonetheless, men still dominate the top tiers.
Fortune 500 figures highlighted by Woolf show that, even as the number of female CEOs has reached record levels, only a small fraction lead financial‑services firms. Furthermore, most of those appointments are recent.
At the same time, pay gaps persist. In core banking roles, men earn more than women, even in female‑dominated positions such as customer service representatives. The credit function and key P&L lines (lending, finance, operations) are especially important because they produce most senior‑level managers and offer the highest wages, yet their management ranks remain majority male.
Study Design: Listening to People Inside the System
Woolf’s investigative process was footed in comprehensive interviews with banking professionals working in male‑dominated banking departments that are central to profit and loss. The sample included 25 women and 7 men, with an average industry tenure of 21 years. Roles ranged from analysts and underwriters to directors, executives, and chief officers.
Participants were recruited through LinkedIn, a large “Girl Banker” social media group, and snowball sampling that tapped their networks. Interviews lasted about an hour, were recorded with permission, and followed a semi‑structured guide covering career paths, gender initiatives, perceived barriers, and cultural messages about who belongs in top management.
Using the Gioia method, first‑order informant terms were coded into second‑order themes, which were then distilled into seven aggregate dimensions of masculine cultural messaging.
Seven Cultural Messages That Keep Banking Masculine
Woolf’s core contribution is a model of seven interrelated cultural messages that reinforce male dominance in banking’s upper ranks. These dimensions overlap and reinforce each other through leaders’ “embedding mechanisms”: what they reward, how they react, whom they promote, and which behaviors they model.
- Banking is traditionally a male profession.
Participants repeatedly referenced the historical image of banking leaders — Rockefeller, Bogle, Lynch — as male, and described ongoing assumptions that “men are always top leaders.” Office décor, suits, dark wood, sports imagery, and masculine‑coded rewards (such as baseball bats and nonfamily‑friendly trips) can be reinforcements of a male archetype of the successful banker.
- Organizational policies are insensitive to women’s needs.
Policies around leave, flexibility, and early‑tenure benefits often send the message that women’s needs are secondary. Examples included lack of paid time off in the first 90 days, inadequate or improvised lactation spaces (curtains pinned over office windows), and structures that penalize use of sick time or flexible schedules, even when formally allowed.
- Traits associated with men are framed as necessary for success.
Interviewees described an implicit leadership ideal centered on aggression, toughness, and an 80‑hour‑week availability standard. In some departments (notably asset management and securities), aggressive behaviors and loud, combative styles were normalized and rewarded. Women who mirrored these behaviors risked being labeled negatively, while more collaborative, measured styles were undervalued.
- There is a preference for men in hiring and promotion.
Respondents reported men “bro‑ing out” in interviews, being “buddied up” faster after hire, and benefiting from the similarity effect, that is, leaders choosing people who look and sound like them. Women felt they had to prove themselves more in selection processes and described barriers to promotion tied to assumptions about their family responsibilities, reduced mobility, or perceived lack of P&L experience.
- Women are excluded from networking and sponsorship opportunities.
Networking channels frequently revolve around masculine activities (golf, hunting, drinking, late‑night events) that are harder to access for those with caregiving duties. Women reported difficulties securing male mentors, extra conditions (such as meeting a mentor’s spouse), and receiving less effort and advocacy even when mentorship existed. This exclusion directly reduced visibility, name recognition, and access to the behind‑the‑scenes conversations that shape promotions.
- Women are socialized to put family before career.
Interviewees linked career impacts to early socialization, educational choices, and ongoing expectations that women will absorb primary caregiving and household duties. Many described heavier domestic workloads and noted that women with small children are “viewed differently” in promotion and hiring decisions. Some reported that their career trajectories never fully recovered after maternity leaves, and that women often cited family responsibilities as reasons for not pursuing higher‑level roles.
- Women experience ostracization and disrespect.
Woolf’s interviews surfaced stories of women being the only female in the room, encountering resentment when promoted, and hearing diminishing or sexualizing comments from leaders. Sexual harassment, exclusion from important spaces, and being relegated to “dead‑end” work combined to signal that women are “less than” within the culture. Some women ultimately chose to leave their institutions or the industry, often in contrast to men who were perceived as leaving for “better opportunities.”
Taken together, these seven dimensions form a reinforcing loop in which, a historically male image of banking and masculine‑coded leadership traits aligned with policies, networks, and promotion practices that favor men, while women’s socialization, caregiving roles, and experiences of exclusion make it harder to stay and advance.
Culture as a Leadership Product, Not an Accident
Woolf grounds her findings in organizational culture theory, particularly Schein and Schein’s model of artifacts and the “embedding mechanisms” leaders use to transmit culture:
- Artifacts such as dress codes, office décor, rewards, and policy design send visible messages about who belongs and what is valued.
- Espoused values and underlying assumptions — about commitment, ideal workers, and what leadership looks like — emerge from shared histories and are reinforced when leaders hire, promote, and mentor in their own image.
- Primary embedding mechanisms include how leaders respond to crises, where they direct attention, how they allocate rewards, whom they role‑model and coach, and what criteria they use for selection and dismissal.
In Woolf’s model, masculine cultural messages are not incidental; they are actively produced and maintained by these mechanisms and then reinforced by policies, structures, and rituals. Even as banks publicize diversity programs and gender initiatives, misaligned cultural messages can undercut progress and keep leadership composition largely unchanged.
Implications and Paths Forward
While Woolf’s study is diagnostic rather than prescriptive, her discussion and implications sections point toward leverage points for change. Organizations that wish to benefit from women’s well‑documented contributions at the top will need to:
- Reassess policies and physical environments to ensure they do not implicitly marginalize women or parents, from leave structures and early‑tenure rules to lactation spaces and after‑hours expectations.
- Reconsider rewards and networking formats so they are not narrowly geared toward traditionally masculine interests or schedules that exclude caregivers.
- Make women’s leadership visible, not just through appointments but through day‑to‑day inclusion, mentorship, and sponsorship that counteract similarity bias and increase access to P&L pathways.
- Address men’s roles as allies and advocates, recognizing that some loss of power may be perceived but that durable culture change will require action from those currently in control of key embedding mechanisms.
Woolf concludes that, despite women constituting the majority of banking employees, the cultural messages they encounter “continue to contribute to the masculine domination in the upper levels of the banking industry’s hierarchy.” Until those messages are deliberately reshaped, banks will struggle to fully capture the competitive advantages that more gender‑balanced leadership can deliver.
