Where in the world you are most likely to get a front office banking job as a woman

If you want to get a job in an investment bank, fund manager or private equity firm as a woman, it’s easy – as long as you want to work in HR, investor relations or PR.

HR and recruitment roles, together with investor relations/PR positions, are the only sectors where women make up the majority of employees within financial services, according to analysis of the eFinancialCareers resume database, which encompasses 1.2m CVs globally.

In every part of the world, women make up the majority in HR positions, with the proportion of female employees close to 70% in Hong Kong. Investor relations and PR, meanwhile, is also dominated by female candidates, who make up 56-70% of candidates in all the regions eFinancialCareers covers.

Not surprisingly, women are under-represented in the front office, however. Below is a breakdown of the proportion of women working in various revenue-generating sectors – from M&A to hedge funds – across the UK, US, Hong Kong, Singapore, France, Germany, the Middle East and Australia.

Asia, as we’ve already pointed out during our series of articles on diversity in financial services, appears to be the most progressive, with women accounting for 30-40% of candidates in multiple sectors including investment banking, asset management and hedge funds.

Surprisingly, for a region where women have struggled to make it into the workforce, women are also well-represented in the Middle East financial sector. This can be chalked down to the fact that the majority of eFinancialCareers candidates are based in the more progressive financial centre of Dubai, however.

Elsewhere, the charts below read like something of a hall of shame for the representation of women in the revenue-generating financial services roles. The UK is middle of the pack in the vast majority of sectors, but still falls way below the 40% mark – the headline figure usually rolled out when talking about women working in the City.

Germany, however, appears to the place to avoid as a woman with ambitions to make it in a front office career.