Gender & Finance recently participated to the Paris Financial Management Conference (PFMC-2019) that took place on 16-18 December 2019 at IPAG Business School in the breathtaking and enchanting Saint-Germain-des-Prés district of Paris. Thanks to the conference organizers Sabri Boubaker, Ephraim Clark and Duc Khuong Nguyen.

Gender Issues in Finance

Professor François Longin presented our paper Stock Market Reaction to Female CEO Appointments: Is the Market Gendered? which is based on a lab experiment using SimTrade trading simulations. Felix Von Meyerinck (University of St. Gallen, Switzerland) was the discussant of our paper and provided valuable comments. Thank you Felix!

Renée Adams: keynote speaker of the conference

Participants at the conference were lucky to have Professor Renée Adams (Saïd Business School, University of Oxford) as a keynote speaker at the conference. Renée gave a talk about her favorite research field: boards. I really liked the way she presented with three questions: 1) How important I the topic of board in the literature? We had an overview of the “business of research” in the field with the evolution of the number of articles published in top journals, the number of citations; 2) What remains to be done? What does it take to do insightful work on board? We had a presentation of what we know and what we do not know about boards. The gender dimension – one of Renée favorite research theme – was presented as one of the main dimensions of future research on boards.

Slides of the presentation

You can download the slides of the presentation below.

Research paper

You can download the latest version of our research paper on SSRN.

Prof. François Longin and Prof. Santacreu-Vasut
ESSEC Business School

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Gender & Finance Portrait Series #1 – Maude CULIS-FERY – ESSEC student and M&A intern at BNP Paribas

Posted on December 11, 2019 by Maude Culis-Féry

In this G&F PS #1, we learn from Maude Culis-Fery, student at ESSEC Business School, M&A intern at BNP Paribas and member of Gender & Finance team.

What is your current role?

“Hi! I’m Maude, 22 years old. I am currently a student from the Master in Finance at ESSEC and a member of the “Gender & Finance” project. I chose this Master for its strong reputations among professionals and the numerous networking opportunities it offers. I also decided to join the Gender & Finance project because I need to understand why there are still now too few women in leadership positions in finance. Previously I attended a finance summer camp and had my first answer, we were three women out of 50 men! Indeed, in schools, women are rare in finance tracks… This experience reinforced my desire to work in finance to prove it is possible and then help other women, who would like to work in finance, to reach their objectives too. Thus, this project represents my first step towards my purpose. As a student, I still have doubts about what I precisely want to do in finance but speaking with or reading about inspiring women helps me to have a broad picture of all the opportunities I have and how I could manage my own career. Thus, I want to offer to you, students or young professionals, a place where you could find different stories about women in finance. A place where you could understand more deeply the finance world and may discover jobs that you didn’t know before. And I hope that by reading them, you’ll get inspire and more confident about your potential success in the finance world. If so, then I would reach my objective to make you discover why I’m so interested in this world.

What attracted you to Finance and how did you get started?

Before ESSEC, I studied accounting because I wanted to know more about how companies work inside. Working in accounting gave me a broad understanding of the business world as business accounts tell a lot about a company’s structure. Then, during one of my internships, I helped an entrepreneur to launch his business by building a business plan and pitching his project in front of banks to raise funds. This experience taught me how precious is finance advisory for the development of companies. Later, I learnt how much damages bad financial decisions could make when I worked for a company in the wake of a judicial review. In parallel, I read a lot about finance in the news and discovered that finance is highly linked to economics and politics two other fields in which I am highly interested. Working in finance enables you to discover different sectors and countries as well as develop a strong economic culture. Thus, it represents an incredible playing field for someone as curious as I am! For these reasons, I attended a double cursus composed of a BA in Economics and a “Classe Préparatoire” to enter the Master in Finance at ESSEC. My next stage? A first internship in Investment Banking at BNP Paribas!

What is your advice to female students interested in leadership position in the finance industry?

NETWORKING, NETWORKING and NETWORKING! Don’t hesitate to use the wonderful ESSEC network to ask professionals about their career, their motivation and their advice. I have written a lot of e-mails and generally people are keen to speak about their career to a motivated student! I had wonderful phone discussions with people I didn’t know, simply by asking them on LinkedIn: “Could you please tell me about your current role and why did you choose it?” Beside meeting new people, networking also gives you a broad view on the opportunities within the finance world, I am sure you’ll discover new jobs. Indeed, working finance is not only about trading and M&A!

Next Portrait

Stay tuned if you want to know more about Gabriel Eschbach who is the founder and chairman of a brokerage firm named “ACE Finance et Conseil”.

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Gender & Finance at the European Economic Association Meeting 2019

Posted on November 5, 2019 by Prof. Santacreu-Vasut

Gender & Finance presented at the European Economic Association Meeting

Gender & Finance recently participated to the EEA 2019 conference. The conference took place in Manchester from August 26 2019 to August 30 2019. Gender & Finance Co-founder and Professor Estefania Santacreu-Vasut presented experimental research on the stock market reaction to CEO appointments as function of gender.

Groups, Leadership and Gender

Estefania Santacreu-Vasut chaired the session on “Groups, Leadership and Gender”.

The session included both theoretical and empirical components, including experiments that specifically looked at the gender component of leadership.

During the session we presented our paper Stock Market Reaction to Female CEO Appointments: Is the Market Gendered? which is based on a lab experiment.

The role of aspirations

At the conference, several invited sessions related to gender took place. They were excellent, and we learned a lot. For instance, Professor Ghazala Azmat (Sciences Po Paris) presented her paper “Gender Promotion Gaps: Career Aspirations and Early Workplace Experiences”. She documents a gender promotion gap in the legal sector of 13% after 10 years of experience. What explains it? Professor Azmat found that 50 % of the gender gap in partner promotion is attributed to the role of “aspirations”, which include preferences and expectations.

The impact of quotas

Professor Andrea Weber (Central European University) presented her very interesting paper “Female Leadership and Gender Gap withi n Firms: Evidence from anItalian Board Reform” co-authored with Professor Agata Maida. In their work the authors study whether gender quotas work. They find little evidence of spillovers of quotas on female career progression and gender representation in leadership positions within organizations.

Future work

Regarding our paper, we were proud to receive very positive feedback from session participants. Furthermore, we received interest in collaboration in the German environment. Indeed, it would be interesting to undertake our experiments in different cultural environments.

Slides