firms have implemented equal opportunity guidelines, followed class action suits, placed diversity initiatives, and created grievance procedures. Access: barriers and advantages A preference for coworkers of similar features to oneself meant that managers often specifically selected individuals to share accounts and deals with; many times, this meant disadvantaging women and minorities for account allocations, performance evaluations and relative compensation. Connections made through informal networks often advantaged those individuals with better access to clients, accounts, and deals. Often, women are driven to switch fields within the business sector, for example from corporate finance to equity research, from heavily male-dominated to those that are more gender neutral. Such trade may result in substantial pay cuts, as the median earning in the new sector can be much lower than the median income in the old sector. Moreover, mentorship can play an important role in one's experiences at a workplace. Many firms have formal mentorship programs to guide promising new junior employees. In cases where the mentorship starts informally (the senior partner does so without company dictation to do so) some junior employees will inherently have the advantage over their peers. This can often end disastrously for workers who are outside of the informal networks that can start such ties. On Wall Street specifically, there were many male senior executives who were committed to encouraging success from women junior executives, with 65% of women who had mentors noting their mentors were male. Inequality in STEM fields In 2019, women accounted for 27% of workers in STEM-qualified fields, and earned almost 20% less than men in the same industries. The number of women in STEM changed minutely in 2021, as the percentage went up to 28%. In the workplaces themselves, gender inequalities manifest in a multitude of different ways. Varying workplace experiences among men and women can be attributed to differences in communication styles and social norms in the industry. Because STEM fields are so dominated by men, women working in these industries are often expected to act more masculine to be taken seriously. Furthermore, the lack of women steers the culture and social norms within many of these industries to become more "masculine" and therefore, many women don't have others to model themselves after and as a result feel that they have to change in order to "fit in". Communication In STEM industries, meetings and technical discussions are often very knowledge and experience based.