Starting Out: Why women need more women in financial advice<\/a><\/p>\n\u201cWhen we did a female conference, which I was very pleased about, suddenly you got a gay speaker, you might have got a black speaker, you got different people,\u201d says Bayer.<\/p>\n
Change, however, has not come easily to an environment so steeped in male tradition. The City was, says Bayer, \u201cset up by men for men\u201d. It was common for them to mistake women occupying a senior role for a secretary, because that was a job women typically did.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019d just moved to one firm, where I had two female assistants,\u201d recalls Bayer. \u201cThere was a fellow who sat at the next desk \u2013 it was an open-plan office \u2013 and on the third day he said, \u2018do you mind if I ask you something?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
When Bayer told him to go on, his response was \u2018when are your typewriters coming?\u2019<\/p>\n
If he saw three women together, he couldn\u2019t imagine they\u2019d be doing anything other than typing<\/p>\n
\u201cI think I was a main board director and that hadn\u2019t been announced officially,\u201d says Bayer. \u201cThe office manager was deeply mortified. But the point was, if he saw three women together, he couldn\u2019t imagine they\u2019d be doing anything other than typing.\u201d<\/p>\n
Bayer\u2019s anecdotes about the archaic rules that private members clubs in the City imposed on women are amusing because they defy logic to the point of absurdity.<\/p>\n
It is baffling why women could use the front door in the evenings but were only allowed in through the back door at lunchtimes. If they had a lunch meeting when nobody was on the door to let them in, they had to run quickly through the front before anyone spotted them.<\/p>\n
Finding allies<\/p>\n
For years, City firms assumed that once a woman got engaged to be married, she would stop working. As Bayer progressed to senior roles \u2013 director, head of private clients and so forth \u2013 she noticed that the wives of her male peers did not tend to work full time and that shaped how they reacted to her.<\/p>\n
I don\u2019t think you needed to be like a man. I very rarely wore black because everybody was in black suits<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat you had to have were men who understood women \u2013 and I suppose you gravitate towards those people,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n
One of her former bosses \u2013 a man with two daughters and a wife who had gone to Oxford University \u2013 fell into that category of male ally.\u00a0 \u201cHe was like a mentor to me,\u201d says Bayer.<\/p>\n
But did she have to emulate the men around her to progress in her career?<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t think you needed to be like a man. I very rarely wore black because everybody was in black suits and I didn\u2019t wear trousers, partly for that reason,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n
I felt there was a virtue in being a woman, but I thought you couldn\u2019t be what I called a\u2019 shrinking violet\u2019<\/p>\n
\u201cI felt there was a virtue in being a woman, but I thought you couldn\u2019t be what I called a\u2019 shrinking violet\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n
However, some took that perception too far. Bayer has met women who try so hard to prove they are just as good as men that they are not helpful to other women in the industry.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s definitely quite a tough streak in some women that mean they don\u2019t promote their own sex in that way, because they feel it\u2019s a weakness,\u201d she says. \u201cI think that\u2019s wrong because you know what some of the problems are, so therefore you should help.\u201d<\/p>\n
Support networks<\/p>\n
When Bayer was bringing up her family, City firms made few allowances for both men and women to achieve a work\/life balance. The ability to ask about flexible hours or working from home was decades away.<\/p>\n
My husband\u2019s practise was much nearer home so he would come home between surgeries and we had full-time help<\/p>\n
\u201cI think people just accepted that they came up to town on the 6.42am train on Monday and some of them left on Friday at 5.40pm,\u201d says Bayer. \u201cOften many of them, at a certain level, had places in town and didn\u2019t go home.\u201d<\/p>\n
With support from her husband, Max \u2013 a doctor \u2013 Bayer managed to juggle her career with family life.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy husband\u2019s practise was much nearer home so he would come home between surgeries and we had full-time help,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n
Without that, Bayer doubts she could have continued in her job. \u201cBut not everybody was prepared to do that and depending on where you were in the firm, could you afford to have help? I think that held people back for a long time,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n
To do what I did at that time, you had to have a support network and I still think that is necessary<\/p>\n
It was not so much being female in a male-dominated industry that was isolating for Bayer \u2013 it was progressing into leadership roles and realising there was nobody similar around her.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was the first woman director at my firm and there weren\u2019t other people to talk to, so my husband has been an enormous sounding board because you do have to let off to somebody,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n
\u201cTo do what I did at that time, you had to have a support network and I still think that is necessary.\u201d<\/p>\n
Queen Elizabeth II and her husband, Prince Philip, apparently came to the same conclusion, as Bayer once discovered.<\/p>\n
You still tend to find that the senior women are talked about much more because there still are so few of them<\/p>\n
\u201cI was involved with the Duke of Edinburgh Awards and we were at a reception with Prince Philip,\u201d recalls Bayer. \u201cPrince Philip turned to Max, and said, \u2018why are you here?\u2019 Max said \u2018actually, it\u2019s due to my wife\u2019 and Prince Philip replied \u2018yes, I can understand that.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
Taking stock of where we are now in financial services, Bayer sees Covid as a trigger for everyone to \u201cdo more thinking.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cYou need to think what it\u2019s like to be \u2018not you\u2019 and I think that may have helped,\u201d she says. \u201cBut you still tend to find that the senior women are talked about much more because there still are so few of them.<\/p>\n
\u201cEven now \u2013 despite the law, the rhetoric and everything else \u2013 firms have to make more of an effort to be inclusive.\u201d<\/p>\n
The PIMFA Women\u2019s Symposium 2026 will take place on May 19\/20. See the full programme here<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Very little seems to faze City of London veteran Elissa Bayer, Rathbones\u2019 business originator & strategic consultant. Elissa…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":19895,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21161],"tags":[21182,5557,23005,2968,23006,22046],"class_list":["post-19894","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-bayer","tag-bayer","tag-career","tag-elissa-bayer","tag-interview","tag-rathbones","tag-wealth-management"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19894","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19894"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19894\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/19895"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19894"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19894"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19894"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![\"Elissa](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/Bayer-Elissa-Rathbones-2026.webp\"\/)
Elissa Bayer<\/p>\n