Gender, Space and City Bankers

Helen Longlands

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781138092853
• eBook ISBN: 9781351606479
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Gendered processes of globalisation, transnationalisation and urbanisation are increasing local and global inequalities and widening the gap between the rich and the poor. The global finance industry plays a key role in these processes, directing its operations from local command points in global cities such as London. Drawing on empirical data collected after the 2008 financial crisis – in depth interviews with male City of London bankers who are also fathers, in depth interviews with the bankers' wives, observational data of work and family spaces, and banks' promotional online material –this book explores the day-to-day individual and institutional social practices of wealthy City bankers and banks. The book's analysis offers insight into how the spaces of work and home are integrally linked in ways that mutually shape, support and sustain the gendered dominance of the industry and its highly paid workers.

This book will appeal to postgraduate students, researchers and academics interested in the fields of gender studies, critical studies of men and masculinities, urban and metropolitan studies, sociology, studies of globalisation and transnationalisation, anthropology, cultural studies and business management. It will also be interesting for those concerned about the role of the finance industry and neoliberal capitalist ideologies, values and practices in ever-widening local and global inequalities.

Chapter 1

Life in the City

Space, place and inequality

The City of London, also called the Square Mile, is an area in central London.¹ It is the financial hub not only of London and the UK but also of Europe.² The City of London’s border runs along the River Thames to the south, the London Boroughs of Westminster and Camden to the west and north, and Tower Hamlets – one of London’s poorest boroughs³ – to the east. The London Stock Exchange and the Bank of England are located within the borders of the City, along with St Paul’s Cathedral and the Tower of London.

According to the UK Government’s City of London website:

There’s nowhere quite like the City. Not only is it the oldest, most historic part of London, it is the world’s leading international financial and business centre with the unusual ratio of 33 times more workers than residents … [it] is a small district at the heart of the capital…

Established in around AD50 … the City is the place from which modern-day London grew … it’s not just the Roman remains and medieval structures that make the City’s buildings so unique; it is their juxtaposition with contemporary architecture designed to house the global business giants that have located here. This is where ancient and modern sit side by side.

(City of London Corporation 2018)

The City, in its broader sense, also encompasses Canary Wharf and Mayfair’s hedge fund industry, which are located in London’s Docklands area and the West End, respectively. The City is home to over 500 banks, including 251 foreign banks, and is one of the world’s leading fund management centres⁴ (TheCityUK 2018). According to the TheCityUK⁵ (2017, 2018), in 2017, the City was the world’s second-largest hedge fund management centre after New York, managing more than 80% of Europe’s hedge fund assets, 90% of European prime brokerage, and was the leading centre for management of European private equity funds. In March 2017, Reuters reported that London reached a $3 trillion daily foreign exchange turnover – a sum just over 50% of the global share. It is here in this thriving, historic business centre – the home of “business giants” and financial behemoths – where the men I interviewed worked.

In the official description of the City given above, the financial institutions and their elite workers are the visible and worthy actors shaping the identity and space of the City. They are positioned as the blood that pumps the “heart” of London and, as such, the lifeblood of the UK as a whole. It is hard to dispute the central role of finance in constituting London’s identity as a global city, for, as Massey (2010) has argued, it is part of what differentiates London from other places and what provides it with its global standing as a hub of neoliberal capitalism. This powerful local and global positioning underpinned the UK government’s bailout of the banking industry during the 2008 financial crisis. It has also featured heavily in political discourse around Brexit – the fear that key players in the finance industry may relocate some of their City workforce to places outside the UK, particularly if the country leaves the single market (Grafton-Green 2017; Treanor 2017).

The portrayal of the “giants” of business living side by side with other shorter- or longer-term inhabitants of the City is one that evokes a sense of harmony and peace. Indeed, what stands out in the description above is how London’s prosperous development as a leading national and global financial centre is positioned not only as crucial but, more significantly, as inevitable and benevolent; through a supposedly natural development steeped in tradition and governed by history, powerful City institutions and their workers not only belong in and rightfully control the space of the City but do so for the greater benefit of all. This description helps lend the finance industry and its elite workers not just a legitimate dominance in the City, in London and in international finance more generally, but a moral one.

This moral dimension is highly significant. Suggesting that the business giants have simply and peacefully nestled in to the space of the City, not only preserving its integrity but adding to its character, disregards and renders unproblematic the socio-spatial and socio-economic divisions that powerful City institutions and their well-paid workers help shape and widen as well as benefit from (whether knowingly or not). The crucial contradiction, or what Sassen (2001: 323) has termed the “urban irony”, inherent in this development of London as a global financial leader, is that the material and political power of wealthy City institutions and their highly paid workers is both dependent on and deepens forms of social, cultural and gendered inequalities. This results in a spatial organisation of London, whereby low-wage workers, who also play a crucial role in the day-to-day functioning of the City, its finance industry and related processes of globalisation, find it progressively more difficult to live there. Not only are low-wage workers increasingly priced out of the London housing market (rental as well as ownership), they also suffer from rising prices of goods, services and local amenities, including public transport.

Dimensions of socio-economic class and gender⁶ intersect in these circuits of power resulting in men dominating the higher echelons of politics, corporate business and global finance. Reference to the masculinised nature of the finance industry portrayed through Tom Wolfe’s (1987: 9) oft-cited nomenclature for the “master of the universe”, his fictional Wall Street banker, was widely made in relation to City bankers in the wake of the 2008 crisis (see, for example, Hell 2010; HoC 2010; Rushe 2011; Stedman Jones 2012). The predominance of men working as highly paid bankers in the City has, however, often been merely assumed in studies of the finance industry in London, or at least not sufficiently interrogated through a focus on gender except when connected with very particular aspects of the workplace context such as “testosterone-fuelled” trading floors (see McDowell 2010). Collier (2010a, 2015) has noted how this reflects a broader tendency in academic discourse to either talk of corporate management in non-gendered language or discuss it in ways that can reflect stereotypical views of the kinds of men highly paid workers are and the masculine traits they apparently favour.

Meanwhile, global elites and the businesses they control in the City depend on a formal and informal low-wage workforce to support their needs, such as the mainly female migrant cleaners who clean City office spaces and who commonly occupy vulnerable positions within their host communities, working long hours, often in multiple jobs with poor contractual arrangements (Sassen 2002; Datta et al. 2007).

One can see, therefore, how processes of hegemony relating to space and gender overlap and intertwine, benefitting a few at the expense of the many, while maintaining an overarching common sense and positive doctrine. Prioritising the economic elite and their interests, praising their success and positioning it as de-gendered, natural and beneficial for all, masks and de-problematises both the processes and the consequences of unequal development; as a result, the needs and practices of many of those people who are particularly disadvantaged by the resulting inequalities are either seriously devalued or simply ignored.

What follows, then, is an exploration of how this process works – how it is constituted and perpetuated on a day-to-day basis. How do elite groups of men inhabit positions of power and wealth? How do they legitimate and reproduce social relationships that generate their dominance not only over women but also over other men? And what are the weak points in this process? Indeed, it is the successful claim to authority which is the mark of hegemony; as such, hegemony is never complete – it is always in contention and thus always contestable.

City streets: where the local meets the global

City streets

By 7am each weekday, a steady stream of commuters pours onto the streets from the mainline and London Underground stations servicing the City: Blackfriars, Bank, Cannon Street, Liverpool Street, London Bridge. By 8am, the road and pedestrian bridge spanning the River Thames from London Bridge station to Lower Thames Street throngs with sleek, suited men and women making their way to their gleaming, glossy offices in the City. Graham is one of them. He was 29 years old when I talked with him, and married with a young daughter, who was soon to start school. After living and studying overseas, Graham had returned to London with his young family and had taken a job working for a leading Asian bank. As a self-professed “poet and bit of a left-wing hippy”, he viewed himself as a misfit in the City. He was eager to set himself apart from his fellow bankers, whom he referred to as “cocks in suits” who “barge people out of the way” as they march to work. He found the City “an ugly place to be” but worked in banking because it paid a “decent wage”.

In the early morning, an hour or so earlier, the “cocks” in their smart black, blue or grey designer suits are not yet so visible. But the City is already hard at work.

Just before 6am, one bright but chilly spring morning in May, I caught a train to London Bridge station from my home in South East London. The train was busy with construction workers, wearing heavy-duty boots and functional clothing, who disembarked at the station and headed off to the various noisy, dusty building sites in the City. I too got off the train, and under clear blue skies, crossed the River Thames and walked up Bishopsgate and along London Wall. On my way, I passed a couple of window cleaners, their waists draped with bright green and yellow abseiling straps, dragging a red hose that splashed water over the limestone as it snaked along the pavement. I passed a woman wearing a vibrant pink tabard apron who was hard at work cleaning brass on the door of an old stone building until it gleamed in the early morning sunshine. I passed a man with dreadlocks and a powerful jet wash cleaning an open-air piazza encircled by glistening glass office buildings. And I passed site foremen in white hard hats and fluorescent yellow safety jackets directing large lorries reversing giant building equipment through temporary gateways and huge hoarding to the construction sites that lay beyond. The smell of bacon, freshly baked croissants and freshly brewed coffee wafted through open café doors and mingled with the smells and sounds of the streets outside. People laughed, chatted, shouted and whistled; heavy machinery whirred and thumped; and barrels of beer clattered noisily down a wooden ramp into the cellar of a City wine bar.

In the early morning sunshine, the space of the City is diverse, colourful, noisy and cheerful. Every weekday, during these early morning hours, the space of the City is groomed and primed so the “cocks in suits” can walk the litter-free streets to work, sit in their clean, shiny offices, “talk to people all over the world”⁷ and get paid many multiples of what the early-morning workers receive. It is in this local space of the City where the global space of finance is controlled.

Creating, maintaining and reproducing the formidable positioning of global finance in the City is a collective process, one that occurs through a nexus of institutions, actors, social relations, practices and ideas. But while the process is collective, it is not egalitarian and is interwoven with potent forces of inclusion and exclusion,⁸ of privilege and disadvantage, of opportunity and constraint – some more discernible than others.

By noon, the City’s streets are ruled by gangs of suited workers who stride along the pavements talking on their phones while clutching takeaway sandwich bags, coffees or bundles of dry-cleaning. They criss-cross in packs from one side of the street to the other in their shiny shoes and dull-coloured trousers. They are not the only people out on the streets – occasionally they are joined on the pavements by other pedestrians or a tourist with a backpack, or passed on the road by a cyclist. A few of the smartly dressed workers are women, but it is the gangs of striding men who visibly colonise the space. One gang wears blue suits, white shirts and blue ties; another gang wears black coats, black suits and black shoes. They have short hair and cleanly shaven faces. They are groomed and brushed, clean and polished. These shiny, glossy workers emerge from the shiny, glossy glass and chrome buildings through revolving doors that constantly spin. They walk, without a second glance, past the smart doormen who stand on duty outside. Collectively, these workers illustrate the wealth, authority and exclusive nature of the businesses they work for. Collectively, they exude an aura of confidence, busyness and collegiality. Collectively, their similarities mask their differences as well as their difference from the colourful yet now largely invisible workers of the early morning. Collectively, their humdrum presence masks the diversity of City space. Together, they create the public local and international face of the City: the “City built on business”. They are the local face for a global space: the global face for a local space.

At 3pm, the gangs in suits are not so visible; most of their members have retreated back inside their glistening headquarters. On the corner of Fleet Street, close to the London Stock Exchange and St Paul’s Cathedral, the finance industry seems more discreet than elsewhere in the City. In the warm afternoon sunshine, I watched as tourists climbed up and down the wide stone steps of St Paul’s, and while buses, taxis, vans, cars, motorbikes and bicycles passed to and fro. While the gangs of workers may not “own” the streets so visibly at this time of day, the space is still shaped primarily for and by the needs and everyday social practices of these highly paid workers who occupy the office spaces in this part of London. There are sandwich shops, a champagne bar, an optician’s, and a dry-cleaner’s. There is a gentlemen’s outfitter’s, a barber’s shop, a shoe shop and a shoe repair shop. There is a gym, a building society and an outdoor clothing and equipment shop. These amenities are not primarily geared towards meeting the needs of the tourists visiting St Paul’s or, indeed, the needs of the colourful workers of the early morning. They are, however, important components of the social fabric that constitutes the dominant identity of the City space – components which, along with social institutions of the City (restaurants, bars, boutique hotels, private members clubs) as well as the low-paid workers who work in them, help knit the social and material local and international world of global finance together.⁹

The buildings of wealthy, prestigious banks still have a significant spatial presence in this part of the City, but this intermingles with an elite sense of identity – anonymity for the many, recognition for the few. As I stood across the road from one of the most wealthy and prestigious of all the City-based banks, I noted its lack of external signage (I myself walked passed it unwittingly on numerous occasions before I knew someone who worked there, despite its prominent location on one of London’s principal thoroughfares). The sense of exclusivity this anonymity conveys was further reinforced by the doorman standing on guard outside the entrance; he resembled the doormen of expensive London hotels in his smart black suit, white shirt and black tie.

As I stood observing, a black cab stopped outside the bank and two men wearing suits and one woman wearing a skirt suit got out. They grabbed their bags, slung their jackets over their shoulders and walked confidently, one after the other, through the large heavy front door of the bank. The powerful presence of the buildings of finance, with their “juxtaposition of ancient and modern”, extends to the power dressing of their well-paid workers: traditional suits in a fashionable cut; a mixture of old and new, stability and dynamism. These structural and material symbolic expressions of power, tradition and modernity work together to develop an image of up-to-the minute institutional, collective and individual dependability and rightful belonging.

Spending a day in the City enables one to see how the space of the City is temporal. The constant process of preservation and reinvention – of exclusion and belonging – signals the ever-shifting nature of the space, and this is important because it illustrates that the current process of spatial hegemony in the City that serves the finance industry and its well-paid workers is not fixed; rather it is fluid and transitory; and, as such, it is both contestable and changeable. The notion of space as perpetually shifting and integrally part of the everyday also brings into the frame the spatiality of politics and the spatiality of responsibility. In other words, it brings recognition that space is shaped through constant internal interactions and relations as well as relations and interactions with spaces and people elsewhere, and that these interactions and relations have a bearing on people’s lives within and beyond the core, a process Massey (2005: 188) has termed “grounded connecte...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: global finance and the inequality of hegemony
• 1 Life in the City: space, place and inequality
• 2 Inside the boys’ club of global finance
• 3 Gender, space and family
• 4 Exclusive communities
• 5 A community in crisis
• 6 Conclusion: the City in reflection
• References
• Index