Women Still Struggling to Get to the Top of the Industry

The women of Wall Street are still fighting to get to the top, according to a Reuters feature.

Plenty of women have risen to close to the top, but numerous factors, from sexual discrimination to lack of interest from recent graduates, have kept female numbers at the very upper echelon offices low.

"I wish there were more," Suzanne Nora Johnson, Goldman Sachs' co-vice chairman, told Reuters. "There's no reason why, at the entry level, it shouldn't be 50% across the board."

Angie Long, who runs J.P. Morgan's high-yield credit derivatives trading in New York, has been recruiting women since 1997 but says that the number of female trading recruits has risen only slightly. Long was one of only two women to make Trader Monthly magazine's top 100 highest-earning traders.

The Reuters report goes on to cite a host of reasons from a men's locker room attitude to the infamous 90-hour workweeks that deplete their quality of life so greatly that even high salaries can't offset it.

"Men walk out of their frat house in college and into a bigger frat house," said Ellen Schubert, who runs UBS' global foreign exchange hedge fund business. "It's hard for women to find natural mentors in a male-dominated business."