Secret Handshakes Greet Frat Brothers on Wall Street [View all]

[Jesus Malverde]

As students vie for 2014 internships in an industry where 22-year-olds can make more than $100,000 a year, interviews with three dozen fraternity members showed a network whose Wall Street alumni guide resumes to the tops of stacks, reveal interview questions with recommended answers, offer applicants secret mottoes and support chapters facing crackdowns.

That’s one reason men continue to dominate on Wall Street, where no woman has run a big bank. General Motors Co. (GM) announced Dec. 10 it would make Mary Barra the auto industry’s first female chief executive officer, the same day research firm Catalyst Inc. showed women holding about one in eight executive roles in U.S. finance.

“There obviously has been much progress since 20 years ago,” said Siegfried von Bonin, head of Dartmouth’s Alpha Delta chapter. “But the reality is that it’s still very much a male-dominated culture.”

Fraternities have become so good at filling Wall Street’s openings that firms can hire several alumni for each woman. There are at least four members among 14 associates at San Francisco-based private-equity firm Hellman & Friedman LLC, according to resumes posted to LinkedIn. Two of the 14 are female. Fraternity brothers outnumber women four to one in the analyst program at Peter J. Solomon Co., a New York investment bank founded by the former Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. vice chairman. Spokeswomen for both companies declined to comment.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-12-23/secret-handshakes-greet-frat-brothers-on-wall-street.html