Various bits of sexism have been well documented, so I won't repeat them.
What is interesting to me is that the number of women studying quant seems to have reached a maximum and then gone down.
But at the same time, the % of maths, physics, engineering and CS students who are female has gone up.
So the % of women who could sensibly head in this direction has gone up, whereas the number who choose to do so has gone down, implying strong factors are at work.
Given that it is an international sport, I reject any analysis that has only one or two factors, since to affect that many people who are that diverse, you need complexity not just power.
I also reject the idea that Chinese students affect these numbers much. My observation is that there are slightly more ethnic Chinese women doing quant stuff as a % than for several other ethnic groups. In particular women seem to be most under represented where they are white and work/studying in the country in which they were born.
MFEs distort the numbers, but in ways that require you to be ruthlessly objective and utterly non politically correct.
Students who travel to another country to do a MFE are often very reliant upon parental funding and support. In the more sexist areas of the world, such as Moslem states and China, you'd therefore expect to see fewer women being helped in that way.
I see the opposite, OK, not a strong opposite, but it's clear the bias is the other way.
I can think of lots of 'little' reasons for that, but no big one that explains everything.
The big hole is white women in their home country, whether that is the USA, Canada, Oz,UK, France or Germany, but not Russia...
Because of the major financial centres are in mailny white countries, anything that lowers local white female participation down will largely drown out anything that immigrants might do.
I will also share, publicly that as a hard nosed headhunter that it's easier for me to place a woman of a given ability than a man, and I don't believe you will find a HH whose experience is different.
One a factor that affects the ethnic, sex, and parental wealth distribution of quants and bankers in general is that it is a 'game changer''. It is not an incremental upgrade in you skill / income, we do this stuff to change the outcomes that come from our origins as much as we can. The christian school I first went to informed me directly that because my dad dug holes for a living, I should aim higher, and perhaps learn how to lay bricks which pays better. Although that's a personal story, I hear structurally equivalent stories from a good % of the bankers I know.
As quants we know that aiming for a much higher return has implications for the risk level we must accept, and so the sorts of people who go for any line of work is influenced by their perception of the risk/return curves.
We can therefore reason that if one set of people are rare in a type of worker, then they have different risk/return utility.
note that I'm not saying "better" or "worse" here. I'm a headhunter, I help you get what you want, I don't tell you what you should want.
I also reject hours as a factor.
My wife is a partner at a very big US law firm, the staff there do hours that are comparable to banking, often harder. At one point we had to match our diaries so that we'd actually get to see each other.
But law has a lot more women than the sexy bits of banking.
This is true for many types of medical staff where of course there are lots of women, and I can cite other examples.
Also, frankly we have to reject or at least down-weight what the actual job is really like.
This is a mainly student forum. Some of you will be quite shocked when you get your first job. Some by how hard it is, some by it not being as hard as you feared. But you are still vastly better informed than the vast majority of the population, and better informed than you were when you decided to look at this line of work.
More simply, it is the perception of this line of work that deters girls from coming in this direction.
By the age of 18, I had already rejected > 95% of all the types of job I might plausibly do on the grounds that I wouldn't be good at them, didn't like the sort of poeple who did them, or saw them as boring or badly paid.
I believe most people are like that, in fact I made some critical decisions later than the average, and with variable quality.
So they simply don't know the facts when they make their choices.
It's also quite possible that they are making good decisions. I advise many people personally on their career, and part of the exercise is to model what they enjoy and what they are good at and match it to the oppportunity set. Everyone does this for themselves as well, and based upon information of very variable quality.
A lot of it comes from the media, who when they write about any topic never include themselves as part of the problem.
But...
If you take the most crazed coverage of Moslems on Fox, or Jews on Iranian TV, this will actually be quite mild compared to how people like us are portrayed on TV. Would American TV carry a series based on the idea that gay people are socially dysfunctional perverts?
No.
Produce the same series about people who do maths and/or computers and it's prime time.
There are several such series, and any number of films, and thousands of characters who aren't evil which can be quite cool, just shitty.
To me it follows that women take more of their information from this sort of source and believe it more.
That neatly explains why 'foreign' women are more likely to take up this sort of work and math/tech in general.
They aren't exposed to English language media so much, so form different views.
This is particularly true in countries that have recently been ruled by Russia, including russia itself.
The number of Eastern European women in this line of work is vastly out of proportion to those from the EU or USA.
Also in Eastern Europe / Russia and China there was almost no religious interference in education, though this is decaying now.
No part of Communism ever embraced the idea that women's role in life was to be passive sex objects, locked in some cave or tied into a tent.
So even though their societies were deeply sexist, women got broadly similar educations to men. Excellent education was a key reason that a basically broken and often evil system lasted so long.
I try to explain Communism to my kids and it's hard because they see it as the sort of thing one might do as a student when drunk for a few days, not decades.
France is similar in education systems, and there are a large number of French quants of both sexes, and French TV does not equate "clever" with "bad".
