"I work for a top US bank and we’ve been discriminating in favour of female interns"

I work for a major US bank and I welcome the end of the diversity push. It made things very difficult for junior male applicants.

A few years ago, the senior managing director (MD) in charge of my team forced us to hire only female interns. We suspected that this is because a big brain somewhere added DEI metrics to senior pay. 

The trouble is that very few women apply for jobs in securities. At most, 10% of the viable CVs we received were from women. This made it incredibly difficult for us to find strong female candidates.

Because we had clear instructions to prioritize women, we nonetheless produced lists of all female candidates and sent those to HR. HR then got back to us and said this was positive discrimination and that we needed to interview male candidates too. We added male candidates to the list, but the MD in charge was adamant that we couldn’t hire any of them. 

We therefore went through all the stages of the hiring process making sure we included a statistically plausible number of males at each step. The process including final round interviews that involved flying over candidates from Europe (we were in London) and at each step disproportionately rejecting males until we were left with two female names, which we duly presented to the MD.

We felt bad for the male candidates whose time and energy we wasted, knowing full well they would never get an offer and that they were just filler in the process to keep HR off our backs. We also felt bad for ourselves because we ended up with two substandard interns and rejected many capable male candidates who would have been great.

I want to say I’m really sorry to those guys. We knew it was wrong, and it felt gross giving them false hope when they had no chance of winning an internship, but we were in a lose lose situation stuck between HR and a psycho MD. Banking sucks.

Vincent Daykin is a pseudonym  

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