Inclusion or co-optation? Navigating recruitment as a gender diversity candidate in finance

ABSTRACT In the decade-plus following the financial crisis of 2008, diversity and inclusion initiatives – especially those targeting gender – have proliferated in global financial centres. Feminist political economists critique the ways that struggles for gender and racial equality can become co-opted via inclusion endeavours, and how they may primarily serve to legitimate existing institutional practices. At the same time, diversity and inclusion initiatives open up counterspace for emerging professionals to draw from experiences of marginalisation, formulate critiques, and push back against processes that generate inequalities. In this study, I draw from field-based and interview research on gender diversity programmes in finance to analyse how dynamics of co-optation and critique play out as recent initiates into the industry navigate diversity offerings. I refer to De Jong and Kimm’s (2017) research agenda on co-optation as conceptual reference, demonstrating how mechanisms, effects, and actor’s perceptions of co-optation play out together in this particular institutional matrix. The fault lines that emerge around institutional practices of diversity indicate where a hegemonic incorporation that would serve the financial establishment is incomplete and contestations over the inclusivity of professions, markets and financialised societies remain.