Women working on Wall Street say numerous factors, from sexual discrimination to a lack of interest from graduates, have kept their numbers low, leaving one of the industry's best assets just partly tapped. Half of the students at law and medical schools are women, but at US business schools their numbers hover around only 30 percent.
That translates into a thinner pipeline of women heading into investment banking, private equity and other post-MBA (master's degree in business administration) careers.
In areas like sales and trading, recruiters often pick students straight out of college. But there, too, lie hurdles, because far fewer than half of the undergraduates interested in such careers are women.
"I wish there were more," said Suzanne Nora Johnson, Goldman Sachs' co-vice chairman. "There's no reason why at the entry level, it shouldn't be at 50 percent across the board."
Angie Long, who runs J.P. Morgan's high yield and credit derivatives trading in New York, has been recruiting women to the bank since 1997. But she said that while women make up nearly half their sales division, the number of female trading recruits has risen only slightly.
Long, one of only two women to make Trader Monthly magazine's list of Top 100 Highest Earning traders, manages one woman on her trading desk of 12.
Women interviewed by Reuters cited a host of reasons for the lack of enthusiasm, from "men's locker-room" attitudes to the infamous 90-hour work weeks that deplete their quality of life so greatly even high salaries can't offset it.
Banks also struggle to keep women who want a better balance between life and work.
"It is frustrating when people drop out, and it's very difficult to get back in," said Candace Browning, Merrill Lynch's head of global securities research and economics.
The challenges don't stop once women land the job - they're then forced to assimilate into the hyper-masculine culture still prevalent on trading floors.
"Men walk out of their frat house in college and into a bigger frat house," said Ellen Schubert, who runs UBS' global foreign exchange hedge fund business. "It's hard for women to find natural mentors in a male-dominated business."
For women who have scaled Wall Street's heights, that apparently hasn't been a big problem. They cited few if any instances in which they felt disadvantaged because of stereotypes about their sex.
"The worst offensive elements of the 'Old Boys' Club' have really diminished, meaning people being openly ridiculed or proactively excluded from things," Goldman's Johnson said. J. P. Morgan's Long said stereotypes had not damaged her career.
"It's not that it's never an issue, but I don't run into it very often," Long said. "I manage a desk of 12 junk bond traders, which is a market where you'd expect it to be an issue - but it hasn't affected me."
Further down the corporate ladder, that sentiment shifts.
Sexual discrimination and harassment suits, which have been around for decades, continue to crop up. Legions of men still visit strip clubs with clients and take all-male golf or gambling outings. And that's hardly the extent of the problem.
Sources spoke of office chatter laced with sexual innuendo, unwanted advances by superiors, and managers who were fired for patterns of sexual harassment. They told of bosses who didn't hire qualified female candidates to "protect" them from being hit on by male managers and peers.
Without exception, women interviewed anonymously felt they or their colleagues could be fired or suffer other negative repercussions if they voiced a complaint.
"It's understood by anyone who puts herself in that position that her career on Wall Street is over," said attorney Elizabeth Grossman, who represented the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in a suit against Morgan Stanley.
Grossman and others also suggested that many of the selective firings and other moves made by Wall Street firms have been superficial "window dressing."
To fill Wall Street with more women and improve their working environment, women argued for redoubled efforts at the recruiting level, better mentoring, and more in-house women's networks - though such networks got tepid reviews from younger women who felt they reinforced single-sex office dynamics.
Women agreed that employers should use more quantitative, metrics-based methods to evaluate performance and prevent favouritism and discrimination. And job candidates may want to focus on finding a niche in certain areas.
"In some of the older businesses where people have been doing the same jobs for 20 years, there just aren't any openings," Long said. "But by the time I'd been doing credit derivatives for 2 years, I was as experienced as anyone because it was a market that was 2 years old. The boundaries of experience weren't a limitation for me."
Banks' research divisions, where performance is measured by output and working hours can be flexible, have attracted successful women for decades, said Merrill's Browning, a mother of two. "You can go home at five and start writing at nine, and the success of your work can still easily be measured."
J.P. Morgan's Long, 30, is eight months pregnant with her first child. UBS' Schubert has five sons between the ages of four and 14, and has only taken very short maternity leaves.
"Is it a path I'd say most women want to take? No," Schubert joked. But she noted that sales and trading are areas in which it's difficult to work part-time or take time off.
Top executives stressed that when faced with harassment or discrimination, women need to step forward. Goldman's Johnson said the firm has an external ombudsman for such problems.
"The challenge is always that people don't come forward," Johnson said. "People should be taking advantage of them much more than they do."
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