I was in the banking industry for years and I'm actually not sure where this article is coming from. Our management has known for years that when it comes to personal bank accounts, women are much more likely to be the decision makers - all of our marketing was directed toward women. For investment accounts, men still have a decision-making edge over women, but the gap has been narrowing for years. I don't understand why the article even thought it was news.

I'm not in the banking world, but I thank the Lord every day that my mom made more money than my dad (and he was totally cool with that: his passion was teaching, which as we know pays jack), just because I never became susceptible to "male-breadwinner" assumptions.

I'm in banking, but I don't work with customers (I'm in operations/legal compliance) and a lot of this rings true with my organization. It is overwhelming male at the top of the hierarchy and female at the bottom, where most of the customer facing roles are. I agree with the commenter above that this isn't exactly news.

I'm less certain about the term 'Relationship Manager' being related to this though. We use the term for those people who deal with high-value business customers (not personal banking) and a lot of Relationship Managers are men. They also make a lot more money than the mostly female personal bankers in the branches.

I'm not in the banking industry either, but I think that a lot of different types of businesses make this mistake when dealing with couples. I work in car sales and I see it quite frequently. Luckily many female customers make it quite clear that they do indeed care about the ins and outs of purchasing a car. I think that the more we work at challenging the assumptions of these industries the more they will change.

Also not in the banking industry, but I did notice this sexism when my boyfriend and I opened a joint checking account. A male account manager was helping us through the process and asked us which name we'd like first on the checks. I'm more into finances than my bf, so we responded that I should be. We got the checks and lo and behold, his name was first, even after we explicitly requested my name first. We also only got ONE debit card in the mail with - you guessed it - ONLY his name on it. I had to go to the bank and request a separate one for myself. Total sexist bullshit.

Just out of sheer coincidence, there is only one male employee at the bank I go to, and he is just a teller (and only been there a few months at that). This means that the bank manager is female along with the remaning tellers and the accounts & loan staff. My husband and I have really grown to love it. Male/female, female/male, it doesn't really seem to matter to them, the person comes first. It is a national bank, but we are in a small town too.

We had the same bank back in Colorado and other than just deposits and withdrawls, I hated going in. I felt like any time I had to change something with the account or open a new one or something, I was treated like a 12-yo by the male bankers. Seriously, every time I come in I do NOT need an explanation of how a check register works, I didn't even need it the first time! If my husband (just boyfriend at the time) happened to come in with me, even if we were talking about my account which he wasn't on, they'd address everything to him. He didn't have to say a thing, I would respond and the banker would act like it was just the 'guys' talking, like I didn't exist.

My hubby is the first to admit he sucks at banking and finances. If he has to do anything more than make a deposit or withdrawl he makes SURE I come with.

My mom has had the same issues, espeacilly since the divorce. She had a court order that their joint checking account was to be closed and a new account in her name only to be opened with the funds from the joint account. The male banker told her she had to have permission from her husband to close it. She demanded to speak with the branch manager and he told her the same thing. Furious, she drove down across town to another branch of the same bank and sat with a female banker. The account was closed and a new one opened in under 5 minutes with no fuss.

"Rich women, often widows or heirs, are seen as taking a larger role, but their involvement varies across countries.

Translation: Women can be powerful clients, but only after their rich husbands die."

Also: There are no self-made rich women. They inherit their money; they don't earn it.

That's what I read, anyway.

My boyfriend and I share an account, and we've never had an trouble with the bank assuming either one of us is more or less responsible.

But I own a small business, and one of the employees is my father. He's one of the few people able to write checks on the business account (which is at a different bank than my personal account), and so the bank had, one month, assumed, oddly, that he was in charge. I would have walked in, politely told them they had made a mistake and asked them to fix it... But he got there first and made quite a loud scene about how they'd assumed that because he was male that he was in charge and they were going to lose a lot of business, including ours, if they ran things that way. And they haven't made that mistake since.

I'm always polite about things, and I have to say that I do wonder if I'd gone in, and been polite about it, if the mistake would have maybe repeated itself later anyway. I'm suspicious that had I made a scene, I might not gotten very far. So, while I do think its really cool that he did that, I'm still irritated by the whole thing.

This doesn't have anything to do with banking, but it does involve sexist assumptions (or perhaps an error of some sort?) from a life insurance company. Long story short, my fiance and I each put in an initial deposit for separate life insurance policies from the same company. We didn't follow through with further required payments after closer evaluation our situations, and got checks in the amount of our original deposits, as expected. Problem was, BOTH of the checks were in HIS name, even though what was supposed to be my check listed my name as the policy holder. WTF.

As good as the company might be, I will not ever give them my business unless they can convince me that it was a random glitch.

Sorry, forgot to add this clarification to my story: my fiance and I do not have a joint checking account, only completely separate personal accounts.

I've been working as a teller at a medium sized branch in the midwest for a month now. There are only three males on our staff of ten--one is a teller, one is a personal banker, and the other is there part-time for investments. In the past month, I've noticed that our male teller is often hostile toward women more than men. It sometimes takes all my effort to keep from saying something (I'd rather not start anything dramatic within my first month).

As for the account holders, I have noticed that it's typically the men more than the women with issues. Most of the time men seem to make careless errors (not watching account balances closely, for example), and they are often the ones that need to have a concept explained to them multiple times before they begin to grasp the ideas.

There are some cases where customers will come in (they are usually angry women) demanding to speak with the branch manager. When they are told that our manager is a female, they get more infuriated, and demand to speak with a male. It's so interesting that these women seem to think that a male is more capable of answering their questions than a female branch manager who has been with this same bank for 12 years....

In Ireland until a couple of decades ago, a married woman couldn't even open a bank account without her husband's permission. And I think the money might have kind of officially belonged to him anyway. So imagine how difficult it must have been to leave your husband.

I haven't really gone into a bank much since I got an ATM card, so I don't have much to contribute in terms of current bank-related gender discrimination: all I remember is that as a kid with my own Junior Saver account, which I was totally authorised to use by myself, I'd go in and go up to a counter with my book and tell them what I wanted them to do, and they always seemed to have a bit of a problem and they'd kind of stare blankly at me until my dad came in and then ask him,'Does she want to...?' YES! That's what I just told you! Just because I'm shorter than the counter doesn't mean I'm stupid!

Ahem, yes. So basically feminism has just replaced child-ism at the forefront of my consciousness...

Speaking as someone who has been involved with the financial audits of banks and instituties that provide financial services in the Asia Pacific Region and which includes Australia, I would say that from personal observation of staff working at such places,it would appear that in the positions of tellers, women outnumber men. This may be largely because of the stereotype that women are indeed friendlier and get along better when speaking with customers.

Account managers are for the most part, relationship managers, and here you see a more equitable split, with perhaps very so slightly more males. Why this is so, I'll leave to those wiser than me to figure out.

Of course, the banking industry in America, where I shall assume that a majority of this blog's readers are from, might differ.