ABSTRACT
The world of finance and the capital market have traditionally been seen as masculine arenas, the furnace of the international capitalist economy where men in suits fight for 'positions' on the exchange floor, shouting and waving like mad men. This chapter examines how the change in trading technology is changing the gendered embodiment of financial trading. It shows how the two types of work were both embodied and gendered, albeit in very different ways. Hiring female graduate economists was therefore a strategy to obtain both qualified professional economists and dealers with the necessary service skills. The male traders met customers as their equals, mates that could be entertained at football matches, dinner and a pub; while for the women these occasions where scripted by the heterosexual norms of encounters between men and women. As they implicitly accepted being 'touched', the seemingly intellectual, disembodied work was both highly embodied and gendered.
