Economic Scene - Work-Life Balance Is Especially Difficult in Finance - NYTimes.com:
"Among elite white-collar fields, finance appears to be uniquely difficult for anyone trying to combine work and family.and later
Finance, on this score, is worse than law and worse than academia. It is far worse than medicine, which emerges from the research as the highly paid profession with the most flexibility. Near finance at the bottom of the list is consulting, another field that became more popular in the last two decades.
The research, by Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz of Harvard....
"Ms. Goldin and Mr. Katz, who are two of the country’s leading labor economists and have published the crux of these findings in the American Economic Review, studied Harvard graduates from the last 40 years....had the disadvantage of creating a decidedly atypical survey group. So the two economists compared their results to two other surveys...and found broadly consistent patterns"Mmm...I tend to agree in for those working on Wall Street (which for some reason just seems to eat up people's time making work an "all-day, every day" thing), but elsewhere?
More difficult to say but will say that I remember taking the double deck tour in Barcelona on a hot day last July and fairly late in the day as the tour was wrapping up I do remember thinking that the only people still working and not dressed for the weather were in the "Financial District" so maybe it is an industry specific phenomenon.
1 comment:
It is not pervasive throughout the industry. At my company (very large well-known asset manager) the work hours are very family-friendly even among investment professionals.
But certainly among the big-5 investment banks and their first-tier European peers, the 70-hour work week is prevalent (or 100 hours in case of the M&A departments) -- and very likely it is the firm culture and peer pressure that is causing it.
Post a Comment