The pandemic has sped up numerous trends playing out in financial services. Mobile banking and payments, for example, made a decade’s worth of progress in 2020; last year the small-business payments firm Square reported that the percentage of its customers describing themselves as “cashless” nearly quadrupled to 31% in just two months’ time. But one area of financial services could be reversing course: gender balance.

The financial-services sector was making headway, albeit slowly, on this issue before Covid-19 hit. But female financial-services professionals recently contacted by Oliver Wyman said they felt they have been negatively impacted by the pandemic vis-à-vis their male counterparts, mainly due to additional responsibilities at home. Some 69% said they observed women returning to the office at a lower rate than men and thought this would negatively impact their career progression.