Caroline Silver has been at the forefront of some of the biggest, multi-billion dollar deals involving global exchanges over the past 30 years. But when she started out in banking in the 1980s, she says her bosses believed they were taking a chance on her.

“They were taking me on as a bit of a social experiment to see whether ‘ladies’ were capable of doing the job,” she says of her first corporate finance role at City investment bank Morgan Grenfell in 1987. “They had got to the point where they were comfortable that women could be executive assistants and so on, but the idea of professional work was a bit of a trial. It was a remarkably non-diverse environment — very British, white and male.”