Womenintechnology and Société Générale is sponsoring “Political Savvy for Women in IT” which will help females within the technology industry identify their power source, how they are perceived and to read the organisational politics in situations.
Euromoney is sponsoring its annual private banking awards.
Contributed by Philippa Robbins and Emma Lyon
“Behind every great businesswoman……”
The Natwest everywoman Awards have been running for several years now but in December 2007, as members of Rooks Rider’s networking group, With Women in Mind, we attended this event for the first time along with fellow With Women in Mind members, colleagues from the firm and guests.
The Awards are a celebration of female entrepreneurs who are running successful businesses, and it is particularly dedicated to those who have had to overcome difficulties along the way, whether financial or personal.
The event was held in the stunning ballroom at the Dorchester Hotel in London and was hosted by everywoman founders, Karen Gill and Maxine Benson. Barbara Follett, the Women’s Minister, opened the proceedings by giving a rousing speech about the difficulties women face today both in employment and as entrepreneurs and the ways in which she is campaigning for change.
Network with others involved in finance.
This class is an overview of a proactive job search from start to
finish.
It used to be that big law firms were the old guard of the inflexible work day. Tied to the holy grail, the universal unit of measurement – otherwise known as the billable hour – law firms were late adopters of work-life balance innovations like flex-time and part-time schedules for working moms. But as the number of hours billed by the average associate crept up from 1600, flying past 1800, scooting by 2000 with little fanfare, and sneaking across the line of 2200, the misery quotient of young lawyers of both genders went up and so did attrition rates, particularly of female associates, who viewed life at a big law firm as incompatible with the possibility of starting a family.
A widely circulated article in the New York Times earlier this month, called “The Falling Down Professions,” documented the rising dissatisfaction and falling prestige of lawyers (and doctors), observing that more young people that ever aspired to the get-rich-quick ideals of jobs in finance, or the flexibility and creativity of entrepreneurship, without the years of arduous professional training and comparatively lower paychecks of “the professions.”
One step that big law firms in major markets have taken in recent years is to give associates raises: big ones. When the Class of 2006 was working as summer associates, they were looking forward to joining firms at the not-too-shabby salary of $120,000 per annum. After they got back to school for their 3L year, they got some good news: salaries had been increased to $135,000. By the time these lucky new lawyers started their first grown up jobs, starting salaries for first year associates had risen to $160,000. Said one Harvard Law grad upon hearing the news of yet another raise before he had logged a single billable hour, “I feel like I won the lottery!”
Offering market views from top fund management houses for investment professionals, the Investment Week Winter Markets Forum will feature a number of speakers offering their take on what to expect.
I’ve been thinking about competition and how it acts as a force for change. In the bear markets we face today, I began with who the competitors in the field are, and how their roles and interactions shape the market. Recently, we have seen a trend towards consolidating the power of stock and futures exchanges and reducing competition in the market. For example, the big rivalry between futures exchanges in Chicago spawned the largest futures exchange in the world. The New York competitors, NYSE Euronext and the American Stock Exchange joined forces recently. In Canada, we see the Toronto Stock Exchange gaining control of its main competitor, the Montreal Exchange.
With all these mergers taking place in the markets, where is the competition going? The Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) Group admitted that the purpose of their collaboration was to compete with NYSE Euronext on that level of the playing field. In this sense, as the global markets develop so does the competition. But, as the former titans of exchange join forces to better compete on the global stage, they reduce competition within markets.
Then we have the smaller firms getting in on the action as well. To compete with the CME Group in the futures market, heavy hitting investment banks have started forming teams to compete with the future exchanges. While this strategy has had skeptics from the start, their large Chicago rival CME Group acknowledged the purpose of these in-house competitors when they upgraded their platforms to reduce the time to market for block trading as well as the time it takes to make a trade.
Help plan the Financial Women’s Association New Jersey’s 2008 agenda, while meeting and networking with new people.
The Committee On Women In Law is presenting a multi day event on helping women further their legal careers. Under New York’s MCLE rule, this program has been approved for a total of 4.5 credit hours, 3.0 in skills and 1.5 in Ethics for all attorneys including those newly admitted.