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For the past several months, controversy has been brewing across the Atlantic about the possibility of the European Commission imposing gender quotas upon company boards. In fact, it's possible that certain European companies will soon be required to have 40 percent of their board seats occupied by women. Which, at a glance, might sound like a good idea. That is, why not force firms that are most definitely not embracing female diversity to place a significant number of women in senior roles (albeit non-executive roles, which is to say roles that aren't technically inhabited by employees but outside directors). Looking a bit deeper into quotas, though, and it's very possible, and even probable, that they could prove more harm than good when it comes to increasing female representation at the top of finance firms org charts. And no one knows just how much harm more than the top-ranking women on Wall Street.

Last week, several prominent women in European finance (all of whom were recently named to the 2012 FN100 Most Influential Women in Finance list) were asked (in an interview posted on The Wall Street Journal website) for their views on gender quotas. And many spoke out against them.

Here's where the conversation left off on working women: with Anne-Marie Slaughter, and her now infamous "Why Women Still Can’t Have It All" piece in The Atlantic:

"All my life, I’d been on the other side of this exchange. I’d been the woman smiling the faintly superior smile while another woman told me she had decided to take some time out or pursue a less competitive career track so that she could spend more time with her family.

Remember that really embarrassing typo in that cover letter you wrote one time?

Get ready to feel better about it.

In a serious case of a picture saying a thousand words about a person, "Vanessa" applied to an administrative assistant position at York University—and accidentally attached a crazy-eyed photo of the National Treasure star she'd saved instead of her resume.

Frankly, if I were doing the hiring, Vanessa would have the job. Anyone saving images of Nicolas Cage looking crazy has to have a terrific sense of humor. But something tells me she didn't get it.

How did this happen you, might ask? As Vanessa herself writes on her Tumblr, her CV was saved as "a zip file titled with a bunch of numbers like the JPG I accidentally attached…" Whoops.

It's an extreme example, but an easy mistake. Luckily, there are a few easy checks you can do to avoid her mistake, or similar ones—like typos, for example.

If you find yourself with a newly printed diploma, without a job, and with some extra time on your hands, here are five books (some nonfiction, some fiction) which will entertain, inform, and inspire:

Youth, Scenes from Provincial Life II, by J. M. Coetzee You might be surprised to learn that the South African Nobel Prize-Winning author J. M. Coetzee was once an unemployed ...More

Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World, by Michael Lewis Not as large of a deal (on the best-seller list) as Lewis's The Big Short but equally as important to understanding why the heck you don't have a job and you are instead trying to...More Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day Long and How They Feel About What They Do, by Studs Terkel The Pulitzer Prize-winning Terkel takes you inside the hearts, minds, and day to day grinds of nearly every type of professional imaginable:...More The Art of Asking Your Boss for a Raise, by Georges Perec This short novel by the French experimental writer Georges Perec is not a step by step how to manual for the uncreative thinker who desires to earn more money...More And Then We Came to the End, by Joshua Ferris A novel to be cherished by the corporate climber as well as the corporate hater, And Then We Came to the End is a heartbreaking, hilarious page turner that is akin to reading a literary version of the television series "The Office"...More

An overwhelming percentage of investment bankers are extremely satisfied with their jobs. Company culture is deemed the most important factor by jobseekers when deciding upon which bank to join. Prestige is the second most important. A firm’s commitment to social responsibility and diversity is the least.

Three out of every four bankers are white males. One out of every 33 bankers is African-American. One out of every 50 is openly gay, lesbian, transgender, or bisexual. A large majority of bankers believe the diversity hiring practices at their firms are highly effective.

Drum roll, please…

It’s the moment you’ve been waiting for: the 2013 Vault Law 100 is here! This year almost 17,000 associates took our survey, and their unequivocal view is that Wachtell is still on top—for the tenth year in a row.

Let’s take a look at the rest of the top ten:

 Wachtell Lipton Rosen & Katz

Cravath, Swaine & Moore

Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom

Sullivan & Cromwell

Davis Polk & Wardwell

Weil, Gotshal & Manges

Simpson Thacher & Bartlett

Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton

Kirkland & Ellis

Latham & Watkins