Intersectional and inclusive diversity in the corporate elite? The case of the financial sector

While this chapter does not directly address central banking and monetary policy, it nonetheless deals with issues of gender in financial markets, which is in many ways monetary policy adjacent. Given the close link between monetary policy and financial markets, this chapter indirectly addresses this point, though further research is needed. In fact, the chapter aims to explore the dimensions of intersectional diversity within a specific business sector traditionally embedded with a pervasive neoliberal governing structure and meritocracy ideology: the financial sector. Lack of diversity within the largest financial institutions has been clearly identified among the leading causes of the last global financial crisis. Nevertheless, the post-crisis regulatory and policy responses focused mostly on increasing only the presence of women in financial institutions rather than considering other dimensions of diversity such as class, educational background, and social capital. The result is that, as clearly emerges from the authors’ analysis of the corporate elite’s characteristics, banks tend to have both a greater gender binary diversity than firms operating in other sectors and a higher degree of homogeneity in terms of educational and social backgrounds. Applying both quantitative and qualitative approaches, the authors contribute to the understanding of how the corporate elite in the financial sector deals with internal diversities and their inclusiveness, and how internal practices are used to reproduce and reinforce the power dynamics of a specific social identity.