After coming to Dallas early in her banking career, Carla Brooks got a surprise at a private club atop a downtown skyscraper, where a man had invited her for a business lunch. “We had to go to a separate dining room where women were allowed,” the Midwest native says of that late 1970s episode. “The main dining room was part of the men’s section.” Things have changed for women executives like Brooks, who today manages private equity funds’ investments in banks for Dallas-based Commerce Street Investment Management.
Where finding women in the boss’ office was once scarce, Elaine Agather, who helms both the 12,000-employee North Texas operation for JPMorgan Chase and the 200-employee southern region of its private bank, says she not only has a female boss, but sees women running the company’s consumer bank and credit card business.
“It’s not been directed from above,” Agather says about women’s high-level roles at Chase. “It’s because we have received opportunities and the support to be successful here.”
Despite decades of diversity efforts, management and executive roles in banking and finance remain male-dominated, an issue that crosses industries and job duties. In 2015, women made up 2.8 percent of CEOs in 60 finance and insurance companies in the S&P 500, according to Catalyst, a New York-based research and advocacy nonprofit.
Those same companies’ total employee base was 52.5 percent female, with each successive layer above more male-dominated, Catalyst data show. “Men make the decisions on promotions, and they promote the people they are most comfortable spending time with,” says Melanie Shaffer, who recruits accounting and finance executives at CFO Suite, a Dallas consulting and staffing firm. Electronic modes of communication like email can impede face-to-face contact, which lower-level employees need in large organizations to win over higher-ups. And finance-related jobs increasingly have regulatory restrictions on what staffers can say to customers and co-workers alike–something that complicates life for advancement-minded women and men, experts say.
Ironically, women’s opportunities to land high-level finance jobs have never been better, particularly at public companies, experts say. The demands of those gigs, including growing legal and regulatory risks, have left many would-be candidates gun-shy, according to Shaffer, a partner at CFO Suite. “So that has created high demand for top high-level finance talent,” she says. “It’s opened doors.”
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SOURCE: Jeff Bounds
D Magazine
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