The United States has, for the most part, recovered from the 2008 recession, stories of corporate largess, ethical transgressions and Wolf of Wall Street-style debauchery in the nation’s financial sector continue to haunt policymakers and citizens alike in 2016. While financial companies bear the bulk of the blame, universities are also culpable as they play a crucial role in determining the mindsets of their graduates. Changing the industry status quo should be a priority beyond mandating that a few ethics courses be thrown into their business students’ curriculums.

More emphasis on promoting gender parity would be a great start. For example, while more women have been attending business schools in previous years, few institutions have achieved equal gender representation. Consequently, the status quo has remained with so few female executives on Wall Street. It certainly doesn’t help that business schools themselves sometimes create the same culture that later drives women away from the field.

Retaining women on Wall Street has proven to be a substantial task. The financial sector is dominated by men — studies peg the level of female employees in the financial industry at somewhere around 20 percent, while only a meager two percent of industry assets are managed by women. These numbers correlate to the disturbing reality of an industry that often pushes its female employees out through casual sexism and lack of provisions for working parents.

Even though gender-balanced companies have been shown time and time again to perform better and more safely than their homogeneous counterparts, Wall Street still looks as it did decades ago: primarily white and male. While this is changing, more pressure needs to be put on these companies to recruit with gender diversity in mind. Schools are getting better at driving diversity initiatives — NYU’s Stern School of Business, for example, works with a number of organizations to encourage ethnic, sexual, and gender diversity. But these programs can only drive change in limited ways.

Unethical behavior should be rooted out not only among students but also among faculty. Financial disclosure guidelines — rules that ensure academics reveal if they are paid to endorse a viewpoint — should be adopted by government education policies. Currently, implementation of these rules are rather haphazard. Universal implementation of financial disclosure rules help to ensure that a professor is unbiased, and it makes clear to students that “pay to play” has no standing in academia.  

For example, Harvard and Columbia instated financial disclosure guidelines in 2010 and 2011, but only after high ranking professors were caught doing unethical work in “Inside Job,” a documentary about the 2008 financial collapse. Universities should make serious commitments to ensuring an unbiased environment, and a quality education for every student. It is in our best collective interest to create an ethical and representative financial industry, lest we risk edging towards another collapse.

Opinions expressed on the editorial pages are not necessarily those of WSN, and our publication of opinions is not an endorsement of them.

A version of this article appeared in the Sunday, August 28 print edition. Email Emily Fong at [email protected].