Banks as Racialized and Gendered Organizations: Interviews with Frontline Workers

Banking as an industry and banks as organizations play central roles in determining access to credit and routine retail banking. However, the persistence of well-documented inequalities necessitates questions about how banks provide access. Through in-depth interviews with 36 bank employees, we deployed theories of racialized and gendered organizations to explore banks’ familiar, routinized practices and procedures. Bank employees’ highly predictable, patterned narratives offered supportive evidence of banks as racialized and gendered organizations that diminish the agency of marginalized groups, legitimate unequal resource distribution, credential Whiteness, and decouple practices from official procedures in ways that uphold racial and gender hierarchies. In the context of banks’ familiar and mundane roles of retail banking and customer service, our findings speak to the depths of these organizations’ reliance on racial and gender hierarchies with wide-reaching implications.