Top Talent

5: Hold On to Your Women

We’ve seen the headlines. In March 2009 Forbes ran a cover story that featured a picture of five knock-your-socks-off, newly fired female bankers—all rising stars—along with a headline that screamed, “Wall Street’s Disappearing Women.” In the worst financial crash since the Depression, financial services and insurance firms have cut 126,000 jobs. Of these laid-off workers, 72 percent have been women, even though they constituted a smaller proportion (64 percent) of total employment in the sector before the crash began.

Hard figures are beginning to come in confirming two kinds of attrition among women in this recession: women are being disproportionately let go, particularly in certain key sectors. They are also disproportionately ...