Chart of the Day: Women in Finance Are Treated Really Badly

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In a new study, three NBER researchers looked at the results of misconduct in the financial industry. Their conclusions were stark:

We document large and pervasive differences in the treatment of male and female advisers. Female financial advisers face more severe consequences at both the firm and industry level for engaging in misconduct relative to male advisers. While male advisers are more than two times as likely to engage in misconduct, female advisers are 20% more likely to be fired for engaging in misconduct. Female advisers are also 30% less likely to find new employment and face longer unemployment spells as a result of misconduct.

Firms may find it optimal to punish women more severely if female advisers engage in more costly misconduct or if female employees are less costly to replace. The empirical evidence suggests the exact opposite. Male advisers tend to engage in more costly misconduct and male advisers are twice as likely to be repeat offenders.

Here’s a remarkable chart from their paper about how often financial advisors get fired and stay fired:

It’s not just that women don’t survive as long as men even though they appear to be equally productive. Women with no misconduct don’t survive as long as men with misconduct on their record. And that’s despite the fact that men engage in far more misconduct than women and are far more likely to be repeat offenders:

Finance is still a testosterone-fueled industry. Maybe it would be a safer one if we changed that.

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THE FACTS SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES.

At least we hope they will, because that’s our approach to raising the $350,000 in online donations we need right now—during our high-stakes December fundraising push.

It’s the most important month of the year for our fundraising, with upward of 15 percent of our annual online total coming in during the final week—and there’s a lot to say about why Mother Jones’ journalism, and thus hitting that big number, matters tremendously right now.

But you told us fundraising is annoying—with the gimmicks, overwrought tone, manipulative language, and sheer volume of urgent URGENT URGENT!!! content we’re all bombarded with. It sure can be.

So we’re going to try making this as un-annoying as possible. In “Let the Facts Speak for Themselves” we give it our best shot, answering three questions that most any fundraising should try to speak to: Why us, why now, why does it matter?

The upshot? Mother Jones does journalism you don’t find elsewhere: in-depth, time-intensive, ahead-of-the-curve reporting on underreported beats. We operate on razor-thin margins in an unfathomably hard news business, and can’t afford to come up short on these online goals. And given everything, reporting like ours is vital right now.

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