I-Banks With The Most Satisfied Workers

THE BANKING INDUSTRY’S GLASS CEILING

Based on user-reported data contributed to the site by workers at multiple leading financial services firms, WSO shows that women are making less than men at nearly every level, from intern to vice president. At the associate level, for instance, top banks are dishing out an average base salary of $139,200 per year. Click WSO’s handy “only female” button, and you’ll see this number drop about $12,600 to $126,600. On the other hand, give “only male” a go and — you guessed it — the figures are higher. Men at the associate level rake in an average annual salary of $140,600. If you’re counting, that’s 14,000 more dollars per year than women.

Though the sample sizes are smaller, it appears that the disparities in pay are even greater ss they climb the corporate ladder. However, Curtis points out this is presently more anecdotal as WSO’s sample size begins to shrink the higher the position.

DATA COLLECTION AND METHODOLOGY

It’s important to note that shifts in WSO’s reporting are constant and they are ongoing as new users self report and contribute to the data set daily. The compensation, company review, and interview data is entered by WSO members to the WSO company database.

Patrick Curtis, founder and CEO of Wall Street Oasis

“For interview reviews, we’re collecting about 300 a month, or about 10 a day. The same for company reviews,” Curtis says.

With close to 60,000 submissions to date, representative of thousands of companies, the database is a sole representation of what users say they are paid and how they rank their employers on various metrics.

But, there’s a caveat. Before the employer insights data is ranked, WSO scores it using a statistical method known as Bayesian Statistics. “Basically, it’s a way to deal with small companies,” Curtis tells Poets&Quants.

“We ask users to rank their employers with 1-5 stars on topics like what it’s like to work for that particular company, overall job satisfaction, and so on. In order to be able to rank large companies and small companies together, we can’t just take a simple average of one star, two stars, five stars. If we did that, think of a small company in the middle of nowhere with one employee. If that one employee gives the company five stars and you put that sample size and rating against one of the elite investment banks, it will not be an accurate comparison.”

Curtis likens it to comparing a five-star independent film to a four-star Oscar-winning film, saying that while the indy project is rated five stars, the sample size is too small to confidently say it is indeed better than a mass-produced film that only earned four stars. The difference in audience size may or may not not offer a true depiction of which is the better movie. To make up for this, Wall Street Oasis uses Bayesian statistics to first convert average scores into an adjusted score that takes into account the small sample size for boutique firms. Then companies are ranked off the adjusted scores and the results are reported.

“As smaller companies have more and more reviews coming in, we gain more confidence that their average is a true average,” Curtis says. “Until that happens, we use this method to pull them towards the average of the entire data set.” 

And WSO pays close attention to the min test details. “On the compensation side, we scrub every piece of data that comes in,” Curtis says. “So we’re looking at anomalies in terms of pay, such as someone just keying in numbers to gain subscriber access or even just a simple incorrect input of data. For instance, if users forget to add a zero when keying in their salary info.”

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