Selecting the sample

A purposive approach to sampling was taken in selecting candidates for this study; it was never intended to form a large, representative sample of all senior women and men in banking going through an MD promotion process.

Candidates were drawn from the Director and MD population who had been through the promotion process in the years 2011 and 2012 and who were employed in one of two different divisions within Globank – global markets and

investment banking. These divisions are historically the most male-dominated and where the bank has the smallest number of female MDs; for the purpose of this study they will be treated as one sample. Access to individuals was gained through the HRBP for each division who, with their respective business heads, selected the names of Directors and MDs who they believed would be willing to take part. This has the potential for bias in that the firm may not have recommended those with a negative view of the promotion process or of the firm in general. However, I hoped that, as the firm were interested in understanding more about individual experiences of the MD promotion process and confidentiality/anonymity had been agreed, any potential bias would be reduced.

There were some difficulties with selecting the sample which were related to the opaque nature of the formal promotion process (this will be discussed in more detail in the next chapter), quite literally some candidates who are not appointed each year do not know that they have been nominated for the process. As one HRBP explained below:

“Yeah, that’s why we were sweating over which names we should nominate, who haven’t been successful, because there was a possibility they might not even know that they were considered ….” (HRBP 1).

Although the primary focus of the research was to investigate the part SC played in the MD promotion process I was also interested in understanding more clearly the impact gender had on this. SC literature generally suggests that men and women have different levels of access to SC yet few studies linking SC with career advancement have taken a gendered approach and those that have, have used female samples only (eg Kumra and Vinnicombe, 2010). As more and more women have joined the workforce since the middle of the last century the concept of separate spheres for men and women has become less relevant (Gerson, 2004). However, evidence suggests that men and women experience work and the workplace differently and that men continue to be privileged above women in the work context (Acker, 2006).

Therefore, I wanted to interview a sample of men and women and preferably a

balanced sample with equal numbers of candidates appointed and not appointed to MD. However, two points prevented this: firstly there were so few women available at this level making it a small population to choose from and secondly I was told that there was some sensitivity around talking to some of the women who had not been appointed and they could not be approached to take part. Therefore, I was only able to talk to a small number of non-appointed women. I could not discern whether these sensitivities came from the women themselves or from their line managers (LMs). This was frustrating for me as these women may have been able to contribute some very insightful data.

However, the fact that they were not to be approached suggests that there may have been concerns over the content of the discussion.

Emails were sent from the EMEA division heads of global markets and investment banking inviting selected Directors and MDs to take part – a copy of the annonymised email is provided in Appendix C. I was given a list names and email addresses and I made contact with each of them. If I had not received a reply within a week I re-contacted them. As I had access to more appointed males than any other category I did not chase up those who did not respond.

Of the other names on my list, only one non-appointed man declined to take part and one non-appointed female (who explained that she was on maternity leave and was out of the country for several weeks).

How the final sample was split between different groupings is shown in Table 3-2.

Table 3-2: Split of candidates for this study

Male Female Totals

Appointed 12 8 20 (59%)

Not appointed 9 5 14 (41%)

Totals 21 (62%) 13 (38%) 34

The sample was made up of more appointed than non-appointed candidates and more men than women. This reflected some of the difficulties with access to non-appointed candidates and also the relatively small numbers of women at this senior level as previously discussed. Of the 34 candidates in this study, 12 had been through the promotion process more than once (7 men and 5 women). These people turned out to very useful to the study as, not only could they talk about these additional experiences, they could also talk about what changes they made to how they prepared for their promotion the following year.

In terms of human capital these people reside in the top echelons – they are highly educated and very experienced; in addition, even to be nominated for the position of MD they would need to be high performers in the role they were performing at the time they entered into the promotion process.