Women in Finance: In Conversation with Zofia Barnes

When you hear ‘Banking’ or ‘Finance’ - who comes to mind? Finance bros? Briefcase wankers in pinstripe suits? Leo in Wolf of Wall Street? Unlikely that any women came to the fore there…And there’s good (well, not good) reason for that. 

Since the dawn of corporate times, the world of money has been extremely male-dominated. But this doesn’t exactly come as a surprise - given that traditionally money was something left to the menfolk of the world to handle because we lowly females couldn’t possibly be responsible for such important stuff!!! (It wasn't until 1975 that women could open a bank account in their own name in the UK - that’s less than 50 years ago). BUT times are (slowly) changing. And there are some incredible women, like the one we spoke to for this week’s interview, who are working within the sector to drive change from the inside out. 

After 11+ years in Banking, Zofia Barnes, fed up at the lack of women in the upper echelons of the companies she’d worked for, decided to apply to study a masters in Gender & Equality at the London School of Economics. She spoke to me about what drove her back to studying, explained the factors at play in the feminisation of poverty - like where the gender pay gap is really forming and who it’s impacting the most - and the changes that she’s hoping will happen (and is helping to drive) for women. 

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Meg:   I work in the Creative industries, so Finance is a very foreign world to me. I’ve done a little research into the statistics about the gender imbalance in Finance and know that it’s a notoriously male-dominated sector – but can you give me a little insight into your experiences? And what the landscape is like for women in Finance today?

Zofia: Sure, so I worked in Finance for 11 years. And it was really the leadership. It’s very much a boys club. When I say leadership, I mean the upper leadership. Up to middle management, there are a lot more females. But if you’re looking at a bank, they give you the statistics and the last one I worked for was Westpac in Australia and they were like ‘ah we’re doing really well with our statistics, we’re at 48% female in the workforce’ but when you look at their actual jobs and the roles they’re in…yes it’s 48% but they’re tellers or they’re in part-time roles or casual roles – they’re not in the C-suite level. So that’s a really big thing. And I think I started to get really frustrated at town halls and things like that where I was submitting questions about it and trying to get to the bottom of that and the questions were always glossed over and never answered.

So that’s my main perception – there are quite a few women in finance – but they’re not in the leadership roles and not in the roles that, it sounds horrible to say, but are going to make a change and can really drive the change which is a real shame.

Meg:    It’s that gap and lack of role models as well in the space that people can look up to that stop them from ending up taking on those positions. Am I right in saying you’re currently studying again at the minute at the London School of Economics (LSE)?

Zofia:   Yes, so as I say – I got really frustrated – the women in the C Suite roles, if they were at that level, it was really really unusual to see a female CEO. In fact, in Australia, in the big banks, there’s only been one – Gail Kelly – She’s the only one that’s been a CEO I’m pretty sure. So it’s really unusual to see them in that position. And the ones that were, were always either the head of customer service or HR. They’re not in the CIO or the COO or CFO roles. So I started noticing it a lot more in the office and it got really frustrating, my questions weren’t being answered and covid hit and I got really frustrated. So I started looking for ways I could do something different and I came across quite a few courses on gender. And the one that really interested me was the Policy and Inequality course at LSE. So I applied for it and my application was all about the Feminisation of Poverty. So yeah I got into that and thought well that’s great I’m going to do that and have a change. My plan is to go back into Banking, but hopefully to drive some change in the gender space.

Meg:    Wow, that sounds amazing! And sounds like there must be so much to learn and unpack on that topic. Could you talk to me a little bit more specifically about the feminisation of poverty? And what you’ve come across in that space?

Zofia:   Yeah, so the main one that everyone thinks about is the Gender Pay Gap. And it is a valid indicator of the Feminisation of Poverty – women do tend to earn less than men. But I think when you look at the statistics it can be a bit misleading. I don’t want to downplay it at all because it is a big issue but I think most statistics they’ll tell you it’s 17% pay difference around about. But that’s not entirely true. If you’re looking at a role by role pay gap – there is still a gap, but it’s only about 4%. Which isn’t great, that’s still a gap. But the statistics can be misleading. The problem obviously then is why aren’t there women in those roles that are earning more money? Because otherwise the gap would be less. So that’s one aspect of it. But there’s other points that come across.

Obviously, if you’re earning less as a female your pension fund is going to be less. And there are also a lot of issues with women taking time out of the workforce – to raise children or other caring responsibilities. It tends to be women that do this, the reasons are varied. A lot of them are that ‘men earn more money’ so, therefore, they’re the ones that will stay in the work – which is a vicious circle of ‘how are we ever going to break that one’? But then that also causes issues especially later in life. So the divorce rate is increasing. And there're a lot of women in their 50s who are getting divorced and they’re being left with nothing. So if you look at the homelessness of women, in particular, a lot of them are over 50, and they’re not necessarily the stereotypical thing of ‘you must be a drug addict’ or you know whatever people think – a lot of it is that unfortunately their marriages have broken down and they’ve been left with nothing. They don’t have any savings or they don’t have property. Or whatever it is that’s happened. So there’s that aspect of it as well.

And then there’s the taxes, so period tax – that’s one of them. Men obviously don’t have to for any sanitary products. (Though, it would be nice if they offered to pay for ours!).

 [We both laugh]

So there’re other aspects like that which obviously cost more money. But there is lots of ways around it. So I think the big issue for me has been the gender pay gap – that’s kind of taken over the discussion and discourse – because it’s something that’s so easy for people to pick up on.

Meg:    Yeh and so easy for people to pick up and wave around and be like ‘women nowadays are earning the same amount in the same roles’. But they’re not actually seeing where the real gap is forming and questioning why aren’t these women in these roles?  And focused on changing or unpacking any other of these issues.

What you were talking about there with the of homelessness rates in women over 50 is something I’d never even heard about before, that’s really interesting to draw those parallels and see how these things are happening. It is scary! And I was thinking about as well an issue that people maybe don’t think about as much in terms of finances, and I know it’s quite a serious one, but is domestic abuse. And when it comes to financial illiteracy or lack of independence – there must be links between that too?

Zofia:   Well that’s funnily enough (well not funny!) but what my dissertation is hopefully going to be on – the policies around domestic abuse and financial abuse. Because it’s only really now being talked about. It was always really a ‘private problem’ and no one really wanted to talk about it. It happens in the home and again you have that stereotypical thing ‘oh it happens on council estates’ or ‘they’re on benefits’. But it’s not. It’s so many different people. So that’s an issue. And banks don’t have policies around it. Or they never used to. It’s only a really new thing.

I think the ones leading the way in the UK I would say are HSBC, Lloyds…but the rest of them are quite slow to pick up on it. And I think there are quite a lot of reasons around that. It’s hard to pick up on it. Domestic abuse in general I think is quite hard to pick up on and there’s so many different signs and it’s so subjective as to what one person would be like ‘oh that’s so abusive’ but someone else might not think it is – and financial abuse is even harder to pick up on. So I think that has posed a massive problem. And there’s not a lot of research and literature around it at the minute. So fingers crossed we can do a bit of work around that.

Meg: It sounds like that’s going to be a really important piece of work that you’re doing. I’d be very interested to read it. 

Zofia:   Well, I’ll definitely give it to you! I became interested in it, I think because I was bored at work one day and I saw an article and it was about ‘why don’t women leave, domestic abuse scenarios’? and that’s always a massive question like ‘why didn’t you just leave?’ And this was obviously an Australian study – but it found that it cost women 10,000 dollars to leave a domestic abuse situation on average. If you’re thinking, you’ve got a woman – maybe she’s got children, she’s leaving in the middle of the night. And it’s when you’re leaving the domestic abuse situation that is the most dangerous point because they know that they’re losing that control of you and you’re breaking free. So if you’re leaving in the middle of the night, you might not have chance to pack things and if you’re being financially abused you might not have access to credit cards, money – anything like that. And it costs you 10,000 dollars. You’ve got to rent somewhere, you’ve got to pay for clothes, furniture, food. How do you leave?

Meg:    God, that is frightening. I’d heard before that's the most dangerous time for women. But because you’re so concerned thinking about the safety and well-being of that person at that time you don’t think ‘what are the financial implications’ of breaking free? And even if they did get away the likelihood of people falling back into that situation because it’s so hard for them financially to set themselves up or they’ve never had those experiences or learnings to do with it must make it so difficult. There’s gotta be more stuff done in that space to help people from that point of view. 

Zofia:   And then afterwards as well, it can be so hard for a woman to go and get a loan or anything. I mean there are so many different scenarios. But a lot of financial abuse is a partner taking out loans or credit in that person's name – and then your credit rating is shot to hell so how do you then do that? Or you may have never dealt with a bank before. And let’s face it, banks can be really wanky with their language and how they treat people. And that’s intimidating when you’ve just left that situation and you have no self-esteem - you’ve got no financial literacy and you go in and you’re dealing with people who really don’t want to help.

Meg:  Yeh, wow…Turning to a more positive side of things. Obviously it was going to be a lot of heavy stuff covered given the nature of the beast with it. But! I know that you’re involved in a lot of really great stuff as well, there’s the Set Them Up Foundation link [My brother has recently started a charity foundation to help provide financial literacy to children across the UK - and the wonderful Zofia is a trustee!). But I saw that you have done a fair bit of volunteering for some great organisations so I wondered if you’d like to talk a little bit more about that.

Zofia:   Yeh, so I’ve volunteered with a few. The first one I volunteered with was called The Smith Foundation and I got into them just through – I did their Christmas Appeal. We packed their Christmas Boxes. And the reason I really liked them is because they’re focused on education. So rather than just throwing money at a problem they actually really focus on how they can use education as a tool and mentorship so that you can break that cycle. And in their boxes that they give the children at Christmas, there’s books but there’s always educational books in there. So that was really interesting to me. And then I thought that well, I’m really lucky and education has always been a massive thing in our family. My Grandad came here as a refugee and had no kind of language skills but for him it was so important that my Mum went to school and got a reasonable education. And my parents were the same, and I was really lucky that I could do that and they would support me and help me so I had the opportunities that I had. So I really wanted to give back and help others to do that as well. It’s also not just about that traditional career trajectory of finishing school and going straight to university – not everyone is suited to that and so there’s lots of other ways that you can get into a career path or something that interests you. So, it was about opening their eyes, so you might not love school, it might not interest you, you might not want to go to university – but what do you want to do? And what other paths can you go down to get to the same end?

So that was the first one. And yeah, I really enjoyed that. And then worked with some other charities through my work and volunteered through work as well – doing community and sustainability. So we did a lot of fundraising and worked with youth mental health charities and homelessness charities so yeah – I’ve done a little bit.

Meg:    It sounds like you have done a lot! And my brother’s lucky to have you involved with the Set Them Up Foundation STUF now too.

Find out more about what Zofia and STUF get up to by clicking on the photo link above.

Zofia:   I love it. It’s such a great charity and exactly what I was looking to get involved in when I moved back because it’s so important to be financially literate. If you’ve got that basis, you can do anything.

Meg:   Yeah, massively. When he first came and spoke to me about it I was like ‘why wasn’t that a thing when we were in school!?’ Beause I know nothing about this stuff, or didn’t before I was digging into it, and it makes me want to sit down and go through their lessons myself because it’s such an important information to know. I think it’s so interesting what you’re saying in terms of actually arming yourself with these things and not just treating the symptoms of the issue but actually educating the source and changing it from that very first beginning point so that people don’t end up in those situations down the line they’re armed with the knowledge in the first place.

Zofia:   And it’s crazy, I don’t remember from maths classes – Pythagoras. I’ve never used Pythagorus! But compound interest…like yeh I need to know that! So why are we not doing that in school, it’s ridiculous?

Meg:    Pythagorus is such a good example, I remember coming out of that class and being like ‘I’m never going to use this again’ but wasn’t taught anything important like, I don’t know – how to rent! Or lifes-kills you’re actually going to use when you’re older.

Zofia:   Yeh exactly, I didn’t know you had to pay extra stuff on rent – I thought anything building related would be paid for by the landlord but no, apparently I pay for that!

Meg:    In the space of volunteering, and positive stuff – have you seen any good schemes out there or initiatives in the space? For specific issues or more generally who are doing a great job?

Zofia:   Yeah I’ve come across one in my research – a really great one, called Surviving Economic Abuse. Dr Nicola Sharp Jeffs – and she’s from the Metropolitan University and that’s a very good one, another charity it’s quite a new one. Again, because Economic Abuse as a concept is ‘so new’. But other than that I do think there really needs to be more done and the Government needs to push for more– I think it’s because they conceptualise it as a private problem – and it’s not. If you could monetise it for the Government and say how much this is costing the economy then they’d probably look at it. But at the moment it’s too in the dark

Meg:    Imagine you could actually collect that data and see how much it’s costing… it must be enormous amounts. Even in terms of like how much it must impact people on a health front too. It must be astronomical.

Zofia:   Yeah and they’re always talking about how much they want to reduce the cost of the NHS. But again they never seem to go to the source of the problem it’s always treating it further down the line. Like come on if you’d looked at this properly you’d have some solutions.

Meg:    I’ve got two last questions for you! And this might be a difficult one, but do you have any tips or what would your biggest tips be for women who are struggling with their finances ?

Zofia:   That’s a really good one, but it’s a tough one. Because I really don’t think there’s enough resources out there. It’s a really tough question – I think as much as I’m really not that big of a social media fan, I’d go on social media. There’s a lot of really good tips on there, some focused on women…that really post about basic stuff you can do…. The most basic thing I think anyone can do is budgeting. There’s so many tools online to budget. And once you’ve got your budget set that’s such a fundamental and you’ll just feel so much more in control of it – so I’d do that. And as well just know most people struggle with their finances, most people feel like they don’t really know what they’re doing.

There is a book, an Australian book so you’d have to switch it to a UK perspective but he’s called ‘The Barefoot Investor’. And he is a really good easy to follow really simple, he talks about everything in a very simplified manner but he’ll get you there…So many people have come to me and asked me about him and I do really rate him.

Meg:    Yeah that sounds like a great start point. And I probably need to order that book myself! It’s interesting that you said that’s a tough question – like you’re saying if there isn’t enough advice or it’s under-resourced in that area, there’s not going to be places for you to easily point people towards but you know with the work that you’re doing in the space – hopefully one day there will be actually good advice!

Zofia:   Yeah, and what Set Them Up (Foundation) are doing as well.

Meg:    Yeah definitely, it feels like the world’s crying out for them really!

Zofia:   Definitely.

Meg:    And my last question was – do you have any tips for women who might be thinking about following in your foodsteps or joining the finance sector.

Zofia:   Definitely do it. It’s tough, you have to have a very thick skin, but there are so many different opportunities so you can find a path that really suits you. What I would look at is what interests you. I think a lot of people have that ‘Wolf of Wall Street’ and people throwing people at dartboards and drinking loads (and there is a lot of drinking involved) but there are so many different opportunities and options in banking. So definitely don’t let the fact that it’s male-dominated stop you. You can get somewhere.

Obviously it is tough and it is cutthroat so you have to be prepared for that. But you don’t even need to know about Finance really, like I didn’t! I had no plans to go into finance, it did not interest me. I wasn’t terrible at maths but it wasn’t my thing – I didn’t do Economics. I fell into it and 11 and a half years later I’m still in it and I want to do something to change it and make it better for everyone, so don’t be put off. Don’t think you have to have a head for number or be an Ecomonics whizz – you really don’t and just remember…what do they say…‘bankers are wankers a lot of it is bullshit’ and pretty much they’re just making it up as they go along a lot of the blokes in it! That’s what I would say, don’t let the smoke and the mirrors and all the bravado put you off because yeh they’re like that but under the bottom of it – none of them know what they’re doing really. That’s probably not going to inspire anyone with confidence in the banking industry but yeh!

[we laugh]

Meg: No I think that’s a brilliant thing to think about and have in the back of your mind when people go to interviews or things because it is like you say it’s a bravado! There’s no reason anyone can’t do it because their not an old, rich white guy in a pinstripe suit or whatever, or a briefcase wanker or whatever!

Zofia:   Exactly! And just know as well there are some great people out there trying to change it. I am! And there’s some great books as well written about diversity in the city and whether the city is diverse and there are people who want to make change. Unfortunately change does take time but yeh – it will change and there are some good people out there! Not everyone in banking is trying to steal your money.

[we laugh].

Meg: I believe you!

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Thank you Zofia for sharing your financial wisdom with us. Out with the finance bros, in with the finance hoes I say. If anyone else, like me, wants to get up-to-speed with better money handling habits or help to drive change for women struggling with their finances - have a look at some of Zofia’s (kindly shared) recommendations below:

Reading Recommendation: The Barefoot Investor, Scott Pape

Great investment page to follow on socials: Smart Women Society

For support with or to learn more about Surviving Economic Abuse