The Changing Narrative of Women on Wall Street
December 12, 2023·7 comments
Women finally appear on screen as competent Wall Street professionals. But the moment they arrived, the stories changed. Every female risk-taker now faces a choice between money and virtue, while male characters stopped encountering that dilemma over a decade ago.
- The absence lasted for decades, then suddenly ended. Before 2016, no major film or television series showed a woman as a financial risk-taker. The only female finance professional in any Wall Street movie was a risk manager designed to fail. Then, between 2016 and now, that shifted entirely.
- Representation arrived as a narrative trap. When female portfolio managers and traders finally appeared in shows like Equity and Industry, they weren't incompetent or villainous. They were sharp and capable. But their competence came packaged with a specific cost: success meant abandoning personal integrity.
- Male characters stopped telling this story eleven years ago. Wall Street films of the 1980s and 1990s explored whether ambitious men could succeed without losing themselves. But male-centered finance narratives haven't returned to that moral question since 2011. It's only the story told about women now.
- The pattern creates three simultaneous effects. Young women receive a subtle signal to avoid finance careers. Male colleagues develop doubt about female competitors. And women who persist internalize the message that advancement requires moral compromise.
- The real question is what happens to talent pipelines. Fictional narratives shape real career decisions in ways people don't always notice. When the only available stories about women in finance embed moral condemnation, what happens to who actually enters the field?
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Comments
What is it about our society that all of these stories are written to make us
wantneed a character to eventually eschew the life of risk-taking and money making and instead settle down and go do literally anything else? When did we all become so divorced from reality that we cannot imagine a person—man or woman—who genuinely and truly wants to work a high pressure, high reward job and doesn’t need to quit in dramatic fashion and go start an emu farm with her best friend from grade school or whatever other fakakta ending they come up with?The Devil Wears Prada is the perfect ending for a writer to convey that they have contempt for their audience. It’s as if they knew we couldn’t have accepted a story arc that didn’t include the protagonist ultimately reverting to her mean rather than finding a way to make her new life more compatible with her old one. It’s the ultimate anti-feminism message that no girls, you cannot in fact have it all, you have to choose and we all know you’ll choose the handsome asshole boyfriend over the glamorous career. Maybe it’s more realistic—after all it was based on a true story—but as a work of aspirational fiction it’s utterly banal. Despite this it’s still a wonderfully entertaining movie, which is probably why nobody wants to dig up its bones and examine them for evidence of narrative homicide.
Fun fact: Both Simon Baker and Stanley Tucci appear together in two of the movies you mentioned, the aforementioned The Devil Wears Prada and Margin Call.
I hated Devil Wears Prada for the very reasons you’re stating. Streep was magnificent, of course, but the idea that the main character should feel guilty about being better at her job than the Blunt character was insane. Also, she—someone who wanted to be in publishing—had to leave New York because her chef boyfriend couldn’t find the right job there? What? No. She’s in publishing. She needs to be in NYC. You, boyfriend, CAN find a job in a restaurant in NYC and if you can’t, you should focus on your partner’s career because that’s going to be the highest use of your energy.
Nate is such a villain!
It’s so good until the third act! All the iconic moments come from the first two acts. We want to see Andy learn and grow and become the kick ass woman she always was inside. We don’t want to see her feel bad for being good at it.
“Oh no I’m good at my job in a way I never thought I would be and my boss thinks I’ve got incredible potential. Guess it’s time to quit!”
And great point about the publishing vs cooking! Nate’s just upset that his girlfriend is doing better than him!
I’m so glad you wrote about this, Ben! I’ve been investing in the stock market since my teens, and 20+ years later there are still no women financial risk takers I can read about/watch movies of. I have teen daughters that I’ve taught investing to, and I’m on a mission to teach more women stock market investing - it’s the only place where regular people with regular incomes can make a significant impact in their financial lives.
Excellent article, Ben! I have read this article a week back and keep on thinking why is Hollywood coming up with the idea of biasing woman against risk taking career, which is a common outcome whenever I read your articles.
I came up with a thought that Hollywood writers have an objective function for the central theme of a story that tries to maximize the likability in the society. The women in the risk taking career such as Wall Street are usually better paid and work for more hours than in an average job. Hence, there might be some envy tied to people who are not in that position. Also, the people who are in that positions believe that they are exceptional and not everyone will be able to do what they are doing. Moreover, the insecurity of not giving enough time to the family, which most of us do, like the idea of ‘you can but you shouldn’t’ type of mentality.
Hollywood writers hit envy, pride, and insecurity in the society with one theme and can feel happy about it. What they forget is that they are biasing young smart girls against a lucrative, intellectually stimulating, and fulfilling profession.
Since Hollywood is part of the theme here I would be remiss in not bringing this up.
The movie “Barbie”, where women fill every single position in society and men are all clueless bungling vanity projects. Every one of them except for the homely black-sheep “Allen”.
Some of my wife’s friends, even those with advanced clinical degrees liked the movie a lot, so they recommended it to her and I went along for the ride (HBO Max I think) at home.
Both of us hated it equally, perhaps in part because we raised two well adjusted boys into successful independent young men. “Barbie” is divisive and perpetuates the widening-gyre even more throughly along the gender lines.
I worked as an RN in a teaching hospital in the 90’s for 4 years, and considered myself a bit of a Feminist then. Got along great with everybody at work, a good dynamic. Always a big equal opportunist, my support of “feminism” or Feminism TM has waned over the past decade, and now it’s over.
Done.
Would appreciate your take on this @harperhunt
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