A number of private equity firms are resorting to women-only recruitment processes in an effort to correct persistent gender imbalance.

One recruiter at a London headhunting firm said it had run four recruitment processes for private equity firms in the past year where only women were considered for junior investment jobs. It was done only for firms that had no female investment executives and had failed to correct this by other means, the recruiter said. The person said: "Desperate times call for desperate measures."