By Melissa J. Anderson (New York City)
Earlier this week the National Council for Research on Women held its annual Fire Starter Awards Dinner. Along with honoring a diverse group of of women and men for their work in gender equality, the organization used the evening to announce a name change and rebranding.
NCRW’s new name, Re:Gender, is a nod to the organization’s historical cross-disciplinary mission of bringing together university researchers, activists, and practicians to work toward gender equality. Aine Duggan, president of Re:Gender, explained that many of the group’s constituents have had a difficulty understanding what the organization does.
“Our specialty is connections,” Duggan said. “Connecting people across sectors and approaches.”
The group hopes to highlight the cross-sectional nature of its work, Duggan said. The fight for gender equity encompasses not just issues of male or female, but also those of class, immigration, ethnicity, ability, parenthood, and more, and sometimes these divisions push gender champions apart, rather than bringing them together. But it doesn’t have to be that way.
“We’re not going to debate the different approaches to gender equality,” Duggan said. “The more ideas there are, the merrier.”
Diverse Honorees
Re:Gender set about to demonstrate its devotion to intersectionality with a diverse set of honorees, speakers, and performers. The evening kicked off with a new rendition of Lesley Gore’s 1963 hit “You Don’t Own Me,” performed by actress and singer Maxine Linehan and hip hop artist and producer Phlaymz.
Later, the event’s MC Rosa Flores, CNN correspondent and anchor, moderated a panel featuring Norma Kamali, designer and women’s empowerment advocate, Geri Thomas, chief diversity officer and Georgia market president at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Peter Warwick, chief people officer at Thomson Reuters, and Patricia J. Williams, professor of law at Columbia University.
The panelists shared advice and experience from their lives and careers on how women can empower themselves and others, and how institutions can level the playing field for women.
For example, after sharing the tale of her first job interview with a powerful man who belittled and harassed her, Kamali discussed the importance of sharing painful or embarrassing stories of workplace harassment.
“Every woman in this room has a million secrets,” she said. “If I told my own father what had happened to me, he would be heartbroken. He would be the staunchest advocate for women’s equality. Tell every man you know those stories and make them advocates,” she said.
Meanwhile, Warwick discussed how Thomson Reuters was working to implement more women- and family-friendly policies, developed around flexibility and parental leave. But, he said, these policies were only the first step.
“It doesn’t matter the amount of policies you’ve got. You’ve got to make sure to train everybody on how to manage those policies every day,” Warwick said.
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OP-ED: Next Generation Diversity: Developing Tomorrow’s Female Leaders
Industry Leaders, Leadership, Op-EdSaturday, 8 March, marks International Women’s Day. As we celebrate the achievements of women in the workforce and beyond, my advice for leaders is don’t limit your focus to the gender leadership gap.
We know that organisations the world over are currently challenged with a lack of women in leadership positions, and concerned with the competitive and financial toll this could mean for their organisation. However, to achieve sustainable change CEOs must be committed to driving parallel efforts which tackle enhanced leadership diversity in conjunction with systemic change efforts targeting their workforce from day one. Organisations need to be focused on developing talented junior women now for future leadership roles – because when talent rises to the top, everyone wins.
At PwC Diversity and Inclusion is a strategic priority. We recognise that diversity is fundamental to the success of our business strategy and with the sponsorship of our Global Chairman, Dennis Nally, we are working hard to get this right. But we also recognise that to do this PwC, like other organisations, must first understand how to attract, develop and retain female millennial talent.
We are passionate about this, so to mark International Women’s Day this year we are launching the research based report Next Generation Diversity: Developing tomorrow’s female leaders which focuses on the attraction, development and retention of the female millennial.
A New Era of Female Talent
Born between 1980 and 1995, female millennials make up a significant proportion of the current and future talent pool. Female millennials matter because they are more highly educated and are entering the workforce in larger numbers than any of their previous generations. The female millennial has likely outperformed her male counterparts at school and at university and is the most confident of any female generation before her. She considers opportunities for career progression the most attractive employer trait. When it comes to the female millennial we really are dealing with a new era of talent; both in terms of the make-up of the workforce she enters and the career mind-set with which she enters.
The female millennial sounds pretty amazing, right? But how will organisations lean in to this new era of talent so they are successful in capitalising on these stellar traits? The Next Generation Diversity report shares six key themes that matter to the female millennial and positions the difficult questions that employers need to be cognisant of when it comes to this significant cohort of talent.
Female Millennial Demand for Global Careers
Let me delve a little deeper into one of the themes: ‘Global Careers’. I choose this theme because I am a millennial woman who was lucky enough to undertake an international assignment to PwC’s Boston office in 2006. This experience was life changing – throughout my 14 year career it is un-paralled as an experience in driving such an intense level of both personal and professional development. In essence, I know the impact an international assignment can have on a woman’s career.
Millennials have a strong appetite for working abroad, with PwC research telling us 71% are keen to do so at some stage in their career. What’s compelling – and critical for employers – is to realise that this is not a male phenomenon.
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NCRW Spotlights Intersectionality with Name Change
FeaturedEarlier this week the National Council for Research on Women held its annual Fire Starter Awards Dinner. Along with honoring a diverse group of of women and men for their work in gender equality, the organization used the evening to announce a name change and rebranding.
NCRW’s new name, Re:Gender, is a nod to the organization’s historical cross-disciplinary mission of bringing together university researchers, activists, and practicians to work toward gender equality. Aine Duggan, president of Re:Gender, explained that many of the group’s constituents have had a difficulty understanding what the organization does.
“Our specialty is connections,” Duggan said. “Connecting people across sectors and approaches.”
The group hopes to highlight the cross-sectional nature of its work, Duggan said. The fight for gender equity encompasses not just issues of male or female, but also those of class, immigration, ethnicity, ability, parenthood, and more, and sometimes these divisions push gender champions apart, rather than bringing them together. But it doesn’t have to be that way.
“We’re not going to debate the different approaches to gender equality,” Duggan said. “The more ideas there are, the merrier.”
Diverse Honorees
Re:Gender set about to demonstrate its devotion to intersectionality with a diverse set of honorees, speakers, and performers. The evening kicked off with a new rendition of Lesley Gore’s 1963 hit “You Don’t Own Me,” performed by actress and singer Maxine Linehan and hip hop artist and producer Phlaymz.
Later, the event’s MC Rosa Flores, CNN correspondent and anchor, moderated a panel featuring Norma Kamali, designer and women’s empowerment advocate, Geri Thomas, chief diversity officer and Georgia market president at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Peter Warwick, chief people officer at Thomson Reuters, and Patricia J. Williams, professor of law at Columbia University.
The panelists shared advice and experience from their lives and careers on how women can empower themselves and others, and how institutions can level the playing field for women.
For example, after sharing the tale of her first job interview with a powerful man who belittled and harassed her, Kamali discussed the importance of sharing painful or embarrassing stories of workplace harassment.
“Every woman in this room has a million secrets,” she said. “If I told my own father what had happened to me, he would be heartbroken. He would be the staunchest advocate for women’s equality. Tell every man you know those stories and make them advocates,” she said.
Meanwhile, Warwick discussed how Thomson Reuters was working to implement more women- and family-friendly policies, developed around flexibility and parental leave. But, he said, these policies were only the first step.
“It doesn’t matter the amount of policies you’ve got. You’ve got to make sure to train everybody on how to manage those policies every day,” Warwick said.
Read more
How Being ‘Happy to Help’ Can Have an Impact on Your Career
Office PoliticsRecently, Sharon Meers, Head of Magento Enterprise Strategy at eBay Inc., asserted that people “feel entitled to female help” at work.
The gendered assumption that women enjoy being accommodating and supportive seem to extend into the office with early findings from Frank Flynn, a professor at Columbia Business School, revealing that women are more likely to be asked to do favors or help out their coworkers. When they do, however, they are less appreciated for it than their male counterparts.
Flynn examined employees at two companies, finding that women were more likely than men to be asked for help and were also more likely to grant those requests. When those who received favors were asked how “indebted” they felt to the person granting them, women were appreciated less than men. It was also found that women who seem more “agreeable” are even less appreciated than women who were seen as less agreeable but provided help.
As a result, women are spending important time overloaded on menial tasks, such as arranging office parties.
In her writing on the research, Meers said that we’re doing our daughters “no favors when we support the belief that ‘women are happy to help.’’’
Carol Frohlinger, co-author of Nice Girls Just Don’t Get It: 99 Ways to Win the Respect You Deserve, the Success You’ve Earned, and the Life You Want”, says that from childhood, girls are conditioned to be “nice” and “helpful”, but these over-caring characteristics prove to be a disservice when women enter the ultra-competitive workplace.
“There are so many assumptions made about women in the workplace. If they’re asked to do a favor; if they’re asked to take on additional work; if they’re asked to stay late; it’s assumed they’ll be grateful to do these taxing, inconvenient things,” says Frohlinger, a strategic partner of theglasshammer.com. “These stereotypes about women being nurturing and collaborative and happy to help are pervasive. Men in the workplace feel entitled to our time and they are unappreciative of it when they receive it.”
Just Say No
Given that so much of the problem is rooted in deeply-ingrained assumptions surrounding gender roles, being unappreciated in the workplace isn’t an easy issue to overcome. However, there are strategies that can help begin to unravel this deeply troubling phenomenon. The most important of which: learning to say no.
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Voice of Experience: Marie O’Connor, Partner, PwC Ireland
Voices of Experience“All it took was for someone to knock on the door, and then the barrier came down,” noted O’Connor.
While O’Connor was completing her Accounting degree in business school, she applied for a traineeship position at a PriceWaterhouseCoopers firm where she was one of six females accepted in a class of fifty total graduates. This program established the foundation for O’Connor’s career at PwC Ireland, where she would eventually become the first woman to be made a partner. “I have stayed at PwC for my entire career,” she said, “and I am quite fortunate to have had a variety of roles and experiences here in Ireland and internationally as well.”
A Rewarding Career at PwC Ireland
Becoming a partner at PwC is one of O’Connor’s proudest professional achievements. “Since becoming a partner, I take pride in representing PwC Ireland around the world and enabling Ireland to be a place where companies want to do business,” said O’Connor. She also looks back at the twelve years she spent successfully leading and growing the Investment Management team practice as a very rewarding period in her career.
O’Connor noted, “Today, locally we have 350 people in the Investment Management practice and 17 partners, of which half are women. Growing this practice and developing the networks was very important for me.”
According to O’Connor, the regulatory environment of the asset management industry is presenting many challenges for companies trying to remain competitive while continuing to forge strong client relationships. “There is so much regulation in Europe right now, and more in the pipeline. It is critical for asset managers to be involved in discussions around all these issues to ensure that we can make sense of the regulatory agenda and enable companies to do good business while building trust with investors,” said O’Connor.
She added, “At the end of the day we all want to grow sustainable business”, In addition to the diverse career path O’Connor has enjoyed at PwC, she has also benefited greatly from various non-executive director roles she has had the opportunity to participate in. “Being able to see business from a different angle has contributed to my own professional development and has given me a new range of ideas and experiences to share with others,” noted O’Connor.
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Accept it – we’re all part of the changing face of leadership
Managing ChangeWithin the women at work discussion, there is a lack of diversity considering the fact that African-American, Asian and Latina women make up only one eighth of all women holding management and professional positions in the US.
Recently, President Obama, in his State of the Union address, supported the case for pay parity and ethnicity, citing that women generally make 77 cents on the dollar for the same job (and with the same education). There is an added nuance here as African-American and Latina women generally make 64 cents and 55 cents respectively. These numbers reflect the wage gap across all industries and classes of people in America, but how do these statistics impact those who identify as minorities on Wall Street or in Fortune 500 companies?
Changing perceptions
Being a minority can be a challenge. We all want to belong and when we feel like an outsider it can have a direct impact on how we shape our careers. According to a study conducted by Catalyst, women who feel ethnically/racially diverse – different to the majority – are also less likely to be mentored by C-suite and senior executives; 58 percent of those women who feel ethnically/racially different are mentored by this group, compared to 71 percent of women who do not feel different, 72 percent of men who feel different, and 77 percent of men who do not feel different. In addition to less access to senior level mentoring, ethnically (when manifested as race), the study suggests that women who identify with non-dominant groups in the workplace are more likely to lower their aspirations.
These diminished aspirations coupled with fewer mentoring opportunities can have a tacit impact in the initiatives aimed to increase this group’s representation at the executive and board levels.
Aspirations are linked to self-perception, so in order to achieve more notable progress women must change their self-perceptions. GEM’s 2012 Women’s Report showed that in all economies within their study sample, women perceived themselves to be less capable than men. While current corporate environments are likely not to offer the role models who look like “outsiders,” women do not need to look too far to find the reference points which support high aspirations as there are successful women all around them.
Business leaders must also work on shifting their mind-set as the real impact of misguided perceptions can still be seen throughout business. In a study run by the University of Utah, investors found IPOs led by female founders or female CEOs less attractive because they perceived women to be less capable than their male counterparts. While this study excluded race and ethnicity as a factor, a separate 2007 study found that over three quarters of the minority ethnic women surveyed felt that the leadership style of white women was more positively received. The image of competence and ability is changing, yet there seems to be slow acceptance of this fact.
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Voice of Experience: Natasha Granholm, Partner, PwC US
Voices of ExperienceOnce in college, she didn’t have an “absolute desire” to enter accounting, but knew it was worth exploring given her propensity for the field.
“The real appeal to me was that it wasn’t just about computing numbers. Accounting is theoretical; it’s not just about being good at math,” the partner said.
Early in her career, Granholm did a little of everything, from serving clients in the tax-exempt sector to M&A, an area she was particularly drawn to because of the dynamic and fast-paced nature of the work. She even did a “tour of duty” with PwC’s national M&A group in Washington, D.C. where she says she grew both personally and professionally.
“It opened up my point of view and gave me a more global perspective,” Granholm said.
Redirecting
Not too long after Granholm returned to Chicago from D.C., the economy began to decline and when the US economy fell into a recession in late 2008, the deal markets came to a halt. At this time, she was pregnant and decided to take some time off from work to focus on her family. When she returned in 2010, the economy hadn’t fully bounced back and Granholm wasn’t sure which direction to take her career in, though she did know she wanted to continue at PwC.
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What To Tell Your Little Sister About Her First Internship
Mentors and SponsorsThese days, internships are a rite of passage for students and young professionals. That rite of passage, however, has recently been tested.
According to ProPublica, more than 30 lawsuits have been filed by interns against firms like Sony and Universal. While most complaints have to do with back pay, discrimination and sexual harassment have also been noted.
Consider this: Your little sister is venturing into her first internship. What sorts of things should you tell her? In order to optimize her role to ensure she’s getting the most out of her internship, here are things she needs to know:
Internships Should Be Educational
Contrary to the movies, internships shouldn’t be about grabbing coffee, running errands, or making photocopy after photocopy. They should directly relate to her field of study or boost her career in some way. Recent reports also suggest this is what the majority of interns want, with 30.2 percent reporting they want the chance to do real work and 47.3 percent reporting they are interested in access to executives and mentorship.
Interns Should Be Compensated For Their Work
Here’s the deal: Interns need to be compensated for their work. There’s no way around it. The majority of the 30+ lawsuits mentioned previously have to deal with compensation; the fact that interns were putting in the work, but not getting paid for it. Plus, paid interns are generally happier and more engaged. Being paid can also help the millions of students who have the burden of student loans.
Consider telling your little sister this: Paid internships not only attract the most diverse candidates, these interns also have an increased shot at getting hired.
If your little sister has taken on an unpaid internship, make sure she’s also aware of her rights — and alternatives she can request if pay is not an option: a stipend, skills training, networking opportunities, event attendance, flexibility, or company outings.
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Thought Leader: TJ Huntley, Managing Director, Internal Audit, Citi
Thought LeadersAs the financial services industry has evolved over the years, so has Huntley. Throughout her career, she has always embraced change and new challenges. This, she noted, is a key component of professional growth and development. Huntley advised, “You cannot survive as a leader if you are not equipped to handle changes that may be required in your strategy, vision, or leadership style. Innovation requires change.”
Huntley added, “You have to believe that you can contribute at a fast pace in an environment full of change, like the financial services industry, where so much is happening from a regulatory perspective.”
Navigating the Regulatory Environment of Financial Services
According to Huntley, the challenges presented by regulatory compliance are currently a key focus for senior level executives in financial services. “Right now, various organizations are going through a series of transformations, looking at what they do and figuring out how to do it better. Having a strong and independent internal audit department is important for interpreting, assessing, and identifying the gaps within an organization, and advising the boards on the risks and independent audit assessments associated with different business practices.”
Regulators have what Huntley referred to as heightened expectations for large national banks and federal savings associations to strengthen the minimum expectations and force organizations in the financial services industry to look at their risk management practices, which include assessing the controls to mitigate risk and demonstrating sustainability of those controls. “These expectations are driving the actions of all the critical banks,” said Huntley.
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Voice of Experience: Leslie Hale, CFO, RLJ Lodging Trust
Voices of ExperienceTo Hale, one of the biggest appeals of the industry was that it went well beyond Wall Street, enabling you to apply your skills and learn new ones in areas as varied as real estate and healthcare.
This love of learning about new sectors was fostered at GE, where Hale was rotated to a different area every six-months. Hale has done just about everything the industry has to offer, from working on Wall Street to working in mergers and acquisitions (and everything in between), eventually deciding she liked real estate the best. She would spend five-years in this space before business school.
“The beauty of financial services is that while every industry is different, the actual finance aspect is the same. You can take your skills and apply them anywhere that interests you and you can be successful in that space,” Hale said.
A Career to Be Proud Of
There are very few women CFOs and even fewer African American women CFOs and as an African American woman serving as CFO of a publicly traded company, Hale is one of just a handful in the entire United States. Clearly, this is one of her proudest achievements.
“I’m fortunate to work for a great company with a visionary CEO who was willing to take a chance on me,” Hale said. “Success, as we know, is about being prepared, but it’s also about opportunity. When you’re prepared and an opportunity arises, it can be career changing.”
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Professional Women in the UK Face a Large Pay Gap and Struggle to Juggle it All
Managing ChangeAccording to the UK’s Office for National Statistics’ Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings, in 2013 the gender pay gap between male and female full-time workers increased to 10 percent from 9.6 percent. It is also being reported that one of the industries where women experience the largest pay gap is financial services.
Clare Flynn Levy, CEO of the financial software firm Essentia Analytics, says men are granted higher salaries simply because they stand up for their rights more than women do.
“Women don’t tend to shout from the rooftops about their achievements and talents the way that men do. They don’t tend to put themselves forward for projects and promotions,” Levy said. The CEO also says that men fight for a bonus they don’t believe they deserved, something most women wouldn’t do.
Levy also cites the financial service industry’s “traditional work environment” as an issue.
“In fund management, there is quite a traditional work environment where you are at your desk early in the morning and you leave relatively late, and it’s quite face-time oriented. There’s an assumption that ‘I have to be at my desk between eight and six every day.’ Once you have kids, maybe that becomes a problem.”
Women essentially have two jobs: their full time, paid work, and their full time domestic duties at home. Given that women often have to work twice as hard to get noticed in the workplace, it’s no wonder the women surveyed in the UK are feeling the overwhelming pressure to perform, which makes the pay gap even more dispiriting. In the funds industry in London, women are experiencing a pay gap of 37 percent, according to the salary data company Emolument.
A Problem for Business
Emolument reports that asset management companies do not pay women fairly. In London, women earn a minimum of £40,000, whereas men earn at least £41,375 at analyst-level, and £34,300 and £34,800 at the entry-level.
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