Women Wearing Pink Slips

Ever since Muriel Siebert became the first female to buy a seat on the New York Stock Exchange in 1967, Wall Street has been closely scrutinized for its treatment of women.

For the most part, men have continued to dominate the top ranks of most major investment and commercial banks. A flurry of high profile female firings last year -- Zoe Cruz from Morgan Stanley, Sallie Krawcheck at Citi and Erin Callan from Lehman Brothers -- put the spotlight again on the old boys club of Wall Street.

And now, the greatest retrenchment by the banking sector since the Great Depression is again producing some uncomfortable facts and figures about the placement of women in finance. Although the recession is proving to be much harder on male employment overall, there is evidence that women are bearing the brunt of the job losses in the finance sector.

According to an article in Forbes, women have recently brought claims against several banks including Citigroup, Merrill Lynch, and Bank of America for being unfairly fired in the downsizing. It's even gotten a new term coined for it: recessionary discrimination.

Discrimination suits have been historically difficult to win in court but class action groups often get settled before making it that far.

Whether or not there is merit for the claims, the numbers that Forbes calculates tell an ugly story:

In the worst financial crash since the Depression, financial services and insurance firms have cut 260,000 jobs. Seventy-two percent of the missing workers laid off have been women, even though they constituted 64% of employment before the crash began....In the two years since December 2006, when employment in the sector hit a peak for the past decade, female employment has fallen 4.7% to 3.8 million, while male employment has dropped 3.2% to 2.1 million, according to the government's Current Employment Statistics survey.

But if women constitute 64 percent of the employment at these firms but a much smaller percentage of its higher ranks, it would appear that many of the layoffs are coming out of the support staff, which is typically skewed heavily female.

Even so, the numbers are unsettling. The banking sector clearly needs to return to its roots in how it chooses to make money, but that shouldn't include a return to 1967 for the female workforce.

by Megan Barnett