London is still plagued by sexism despite promises of change

A new report has found women working in the city’s financial district are routinely subjected to ‘shocking’ levels of harassment and abuse. 

Calls to eradicate sexism in London’s corporate settings have been ongoing for years. Despite continued reports of harassment and bullying in the workplace, women are still facing ‘shocking’ levels of sexism in the capital, according to a new MP report.

The Treasury Committee have said efforts to tackle sexism in London are moving at a ‘snail’s pace’, and while there has been a small increase in the representation of women in senior roles, progress has been inadequate.

‘Our efforts have been well-intentioned but they have often been off target,’ said gender equality campaigner Baroness Helena Morrissey.

Morrisey, who worked in the financial sector for 30 years, chairs the Diversity Project, which aims to change the gender balance in the investment industry.

The publishing of the report came on International Women’s Day, shining a spotlight on the longstanding complacency of many in the corporate sector.

Morrisey argues that a ‘rapping of knuckles’ isn’t enough to enforce tangible change, and more needs to be done from within the industry – from men themselves.

Earlier this year, women working in London’s financial hubs gave testimonies citing ‘tokenistic’ diversity efforts from within the industry.

Women across banking, insurance, and asset management argued that wider social changes have ‘barely affected’ the finance world since the #MeToo movement. While sexist ‘banter’ may have waned, testimonies stated that ‘misogynistic mindsets remained widespread’.

And last November, the Equality and Human Rights Commission issued a warning about the scale of sexual misconduct in London’s Square Mile. According to reports shared at the time, sexual harassment is still ‘prevalent’ in the City, with women being silenced using controversial Non-Disclosure Agreements (NDAs).

Business reporter Sarah Taaffe-Maquire is among those who have called on the government to scrap NDAs and legally mandate the inclusion of pay scales in job adverts.

Others have recommended the threshold size for gender pay gap reporting should be reduced. As it stands, employers with 250 or more staff must report on the gap between women and men’s pay. Campaigners suggest this should be as small as 50.

Women working in London’s financial sector have shared that the industry’s ‘work hard, play hard’ mentality makes it incredibly hard for women with children to progress.

‘At more senior levels it was almost exclusively men, who were married and had families and non-working wives, so for me, as a senior woman, I was a rarity’, said Francis Coppola, an independent market commentator.

While the gender imbalance and sexism reports paint London’s financial hub as a bubble of misogynistic behaviour, these reports highlight the widespread imbalance between women and men when it comes to finances and career progression.

The negativity towards women who call for economic parity is still rife. Scottish Widows, a life insurance and pensions firm, launched an ‘industry-first tool’ to calculate the gender pension gap as part of their 2024 International Women’s Day campaign.

But the program’s effectiveness, highlighting the try extent of the disparity between men and women’s pensions, the response online was overwhelmingly pessimistic.