Forget chauvinism: It’s good to be a woman in business

Article here. Excerpt:

'ALMOST every week, another story portrays the City as a bastion of chauvinism, where women are underpaid and undervalued, dominated by macho males and discriminated against.

In almost 20 years, I have never seen this happen. I have never been overlooked for a job, promotion or pay rise because I was a woman. My salary was the same as my male colleagues’ – and sometimes higher – and the “ceilings” I came up against were perfectly tangible and mostly to do with poor performance or lack of skills.

I actually find that being a woman in business is an advantage. You are different and have more chances of being noticed. In a room full of men in grey suits, a woman commands attention. Vigdís Finnbogadóttir, former President of Iceland and the world’s first democratically elected female head of state, wore a striking blue dress to her inauguration because it allowed her “to stand out from the men”. When I was 26, my photo appeared on the front page of The New York Times because I was the only woman in an article about young professionals in Russia.

Then there is positive discrimination, which is as ripe in the City as sexism. A decade or so ago, when I was applying for a job at what is widely considered the world’s best investment bank, the MD told me (after a few drinks) that, other things being equal, the bank would hire a woman over a man. A staggeringly incompetent partner at one of my old firms held on to her job for over 20 years, surviving recessions and redundancies. No-one knows why she is still there, and the only explanation is that she is a woman.'