Early exposure to role models lifts girls' interest in finance careers by 31%

Progress on gender equality in business leadership remains slow despite decades of policy attention. Women held 35.2% of managerial roles across the EU in 2024, up from 31.8% a decade earlier, according to the European Commission, while in the United States the number of women leading S&P 500 companies rose from nine in 2000 to 48 in 2025, per the Eos Foundation's Women's Power Gap Initiative. Within the S&P 100, women account for only 17% of new CEO appointments and 24% of executive management roles.

The root cause, the piece argues, may lie earlier than the workplace itself: gendered stereotypes about careers that take hold in childhood and go largely unaddressed by education systems. A three-year study by the UK's Careers & Enterprise Company found that career stereotypes begin shaping aspirations from around age six, with many students having internalised assumptions about "appropriate" professions well before secondary school. The same study found that targeted intervention, such as workplace visits and exposure to diverse role models, measurably shifts those assumptions, producing a 31% rise in girls' interest in business and finance alongside a decline in traditional leanings toward caring and teaching roles.

This early divergence compounds in STEM fields. Unesco's Global Education Monitoring Report puts women's share of STEM graduates worldwide at 35%, with little movement over the past decade. The European Commission's She Figures report finds that women make up only 22% of IT doctoral graduates and 9% of inventors in the EU, and just one in four women with an IT degree enters a digital occupation, compared with more than half of men. Women hold 26% of data science and AI roles and 15% of engineering roles.

Even where women clear educational barriers, workplace disparities widen over time. Research from the Forté Foundation on MBA graduates found the gender pay gap grows from 6% in graduates' first post-MBA role to 17% in their current positions, alongside gaps in promotion rates, team size and proximity to senior leadership.

Francesca Caroleo, country HR officer for Citi in Luxembourg, argues that preparing more women for the financial industry starts within education, with schools giving girls the freedom to explore any field without predefined paths. She points to resilience as a critical asset for women navigating historically male-dominated fields, and highlights Luxembourg's Gender Finance Task Force, which brings together public institutions, academic experts and private-sector professionals, as a model for the kind of cross-sector collaboration that can accelerate change.

The piece closes on practical steps: education systems should build gender-sensitive approaches into curricula and expand career exposure programmes; businesses should partner with schools through mentorships and internships; and organisations should embed inclusion into everyday practice, from recruitment through to promotion and leadership development, rather than treating it as a policy statement alone.

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