Few female students today choose to specialize in finance during and after their studies, even when they tend to perform generally better in the classroom. This is the case despite the fact that today’s business school classrooms composition is gender-balanced.

This observation pushed the founders of the project, Professor François Longin and Professor Estefania Santacreu-Vasut to create the project Gender & Finance, which is structured around three axes : research, pedagogy and policy.

The mission statement reflects these three complementary approaches: « Unblinding gender in finance, from the classroom to the trading floor ».

About the founders

François Longin – ESSEC Business School

François Longin is a professor of finance at ESSEC Business School. He pursues a career in the banking and financial by associating consulting, research and training. He advises financial institutions for their risk management and firms for their financial management. His research works published in international journals are mainly related to extreme events in finance and risk management for trading rooms and fund management firms.

For the Gender & Finance project, François Longin brings his expertise in finance, especially in behavioral finance with the SimTrade application, which allows to run experiments.

“ From my experience as an academic and a practitioner, I believe that taking into account the gender dimension can bring value. ”

Estefania Santacreu-Vasut – ESSEC Business School

Estefania Santacreu-Vasut is associate professor of economics at ESSEC Business School and THEMA. She received her PhD in Economics at UC Berkeley in 2010. Her fields of research are gender economics and institutions. Her research has been published in the Journal of Development Economics and Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, among others. She received the SSE/WAIB Award for Increased Gender Awareness in IB Research Sponsored by the Stockholm School of Economics (SEE) and Women in AIB (WAIB) in 2014 and in 2015.

For the Gender & Finance project, Estefania brings her expertise in gender economics, especially with relation to the cultural and institutional determinants of gender inequality.

“ From my experience as a researcher, I believe that taking into account the cultural and institutional dimension of gender inequality can bring value. ”

Team members

Louis Labonne – ESSEC Business School

Louis is a student at ESSEC Business School in the MIM program. He was part of a research project that aimed at studying the influence of gendered events on individual decisions in a simulated financial market. To that end, he carried out an experiment with over 150 participants among first-year ESSEC students using the trading-simulation platform SimTrade. He later participated in a workshop to present the project’s findings to high school students, members of the Winning Girls association.

Aatreyi Mitra – ESSEC Business School

Aatreyi is an alumni of ESSEC Business School, MIM program. She is currently working with the United Nations, New York in their supply chain analytics for peace keeping missions. While at ESSEC, she was part of the Leadership & Diversity Chair by L’Oreal and was key in developing the MOOC “Diversity at the Workplace”. Aatreyi represented ESSEC at the One Young World 2017, held the prestigious Charpak Scholarship and contributed to the several projects for Gender & Finance found on this website.

About the Gender & Finance project