In yet another example of how tough the workplace can be for women, CNN reports that female financial advisors at Wells Fargo Advisors are 27 percent more likely than the firm's male advisors to be canned for misconduct.
The report cites a study by professors Mark Egan of the University of Minnesota, Gregor Matvos from the University of Chicago and Amit Seru of Stanford University that was published by the National Bureau of Economic Research.
The authors studied 44 firms studied between 2005 and 2015, and found that Wells Fargo advisors had the highest rate of female workers leaving.
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Following closely was A.G. Edwards, also a division of Wells Fargo. "The researchers connected the dots," the report says, "and concluded the employees were often leaving because they were fired."
It's one more chink in the already dented armor of a firm that's made headlines for pressuring employees into opening fake accounts for customers without their permission. Former Wells Fargo employees, the report adds, have told CNNMoney of being retaliated against for having called the bank's ethics hotline about the illegal sales activity.
Other firms with a harsher record for female workers were SunTrust Investment Services and Allstate Financial Services, where female workers were more than 20 percent more likely to lose their jobs than men over a misconduct issues.
Also winning the dubious honor of making the top 10 were Morgan Stanley, Bank of America Investment Services and JPMorgan Securities.
And it's not because women misbehave more. The study finds, after reviewing data on the approximately 1.2 million registered financial advisors in the U.S., females industrywide face more severe punishment than men; they are 20 percent more likely to be fired after missteps and 30 percent less likely to find new jobs.
And that's in spite of the fact that men are three times more likely to indulge in misconduct and twice as likely to repeat that behavior. In addition, men's conduct costs their employers 20 percent more.
And while the financial advisory industry's reputation is hardly spotless, women behave better overall. While approximately one out of every 13 licensed employees in the industry has a record of misconduct, among females it falls to just 1 in 33.
The study has been criticized by the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association for including all licensed securities personnel, although SIFMA does concede that while "less than half"" of these employees are actually client-facing financial advisors, the other half occupy critical positions such as traders, investment bankers or compliance and legal employees.
In addition, the study finds that there are "large and pervasive differences in the treatment of male and female advisers," with females experiencing a "disproportionate share" of misconduct complaints filed by their firms rather than by customers or regulators.
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