By Melissa J. Anderson (New York City)
“I wanted to be a banker my whole life,” said Maria Coyne, Executive Vice President, Business Banking Segment Group at Key Bank. Coyne graduated with a degree in finance from Notre Dame in 1982, and besides a three year foray into the non profit sector, has spent her 25 year career in banking. While she has worked in just about every part of the bank, she said, she’s always come back to small business.
“It’s where my heart was,” she said. “Particularly the women’s business sector.”
Among her proudest achievements, Coyne includes the work she’s done with the Key4Women program – Key’s program for female business owners, providing financial solutions, networking opportunities, and education. She explained that, going back to the late ’90s, Key Bank was studying the needs of women business owners. “We saw that they just weren’t applying for loans.”
“We identified it as a need and wanted to make it real.” She said the program has gone a long way in helping understand the economic value in women-owned businesses. “This is not just a “feel good” project,” she said. “These women have sophisticated business needs.”
She continued, “The most thrilling thing for me has been to see these companies grow and expand through the program.”
In 2005, Key Bank has committed to lending $1 billion over the next three years, and accomplished that goal early in 2007. “So we said, ‘Let’s double it.’” That goal, she said, was achieved in 2009. The bank is on track to achieve its next goal of 3 billion by 2012.
On the horizon, Coyne said, is a program for non profit entities similar to Key4Women. “We want to help non profits find financial solutions. We’re very excited about it.” Additionally, Coyne said, so many of the bank’s employees sit on non profit boards that the program is energizing the entire leadership team. “We’re well suited to serve non profits,” she added.
Coyne is particularly excited about the financial education portion of the two programs.
She said, “I think financial education is so important in virtually every aspect of our industry. On the consumer side, particularly in the “unbanked,” there is heightened awareness around people better managing their finances. One of the good things that came out of this bad cycle is that we are building the tools to help people manage their finances better.”
Voice of Experience: Birgit Neu, COO, Corporate Development, Global Banking and Markets, HSBC
Voices of Experience“All things are possible,” said Birgit Neu, COO, Corporate Development, Global Banking and Markets, HSBC. “This industry can be challenging, but if women really want it, it’s theirs to take if they grab it with both hands.”
Neu’s career path has led her through various industries and environments – from working with “blue-haired, mohawked” creatives to the more traditional financial industry. She is passionate about the importance of getting every part of an organization motivated toward gender equality – including the men.
“We need to have everybody take part in the conversation about gender equality,” she explained, “because everybody can make an impact.”
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Five People You Need On Your Personal Board of Directors
Featured, Mentors and SponsorsDirection and guidance are two things that are always helpful in the business world, whether you’re a seasoned professional with years of experience under your belt – or you’re working your first major job out of college. Many women are under the impression that obtaining leadership assistance requires intervention from their company in the form of a mentor or sponsorship, but there are options that fall outside of a company’s official capacity, and some would argue they are better than anything your company could offer.
Welcome to your own personal board of directors.
By definition, a board of directors is a body of elected or appointed members who jointly oversee the activities of a company. In this case, not only are you the company, but you’re also the chairman of the board and it’s up to you to handpick each board member according to your needs. How’s that for power?
According to Caroline Dowd-Higgins, a career coach and author of the book This is Not the Career I Ordered, the idea behind creating your own board is a spin on the “it takes a village” philosophy and it encourages women to gather a group of trusted confidantes that can empower her, motivate her, and give her a nudge in the right direction to help her meet her goals. Dowd-Higgins explored the board concept in her column, which outlined seven functions prospective board members can be accountable for, including motivation, connecting, and training.
But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. First, you have to pick your board members… here’s how.
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Thought Leaders: Prioritizing Risk Management
Thought LeadersThere are countless individuals who want better information from their service providers about risk and are prepared to vote with their feet if they don’t get good answers. After all, these institutional investors themselves are confronted with a bevy of new mandates that require transparency. The good news is that change opens the door to business opportunities. Enlightened organizations that have good processes in place and have nothing to hide can differentiate themselves from competitors. Providing clients with education and data tools offers yet another way for asset managers, consultants, banks, and advisors to forge stronger relationships with their pension, endowment, foundation and family office clients. On the flip side, those who are reluctant to explain how they manage their financial, operational and legal risks may lose clients or worse yet, could end up as defendants in a lawsuit.
Pay to play conflicts, questions about hidden fees, state and federal legislation and new accounting rules are a few of the forces at work to ensure that trillions of institutional dollars are in good hands. Effective investment stewardship is no longer a luxury. Recent surveys confirm that buy side decision-makers continue to emphasize governance and risk management for their organizations as well as providers of products and services. Institutional investors can ill afford to lose money after a tumultuous few years. Investment committee members who give short shrift to fiduciary duties could end up being investigated by regulators or sued. According to federal court data, the number of ERISA lawsuits is going up. Factor in investment arbitrations, enforcement actions and “piggyback” securities litigation allegations and it is clear that unhappy investors are not going to accept the status quo.
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Movers and Shakers: Maria Coyne, Executive Vice President, Business Banking Segment Group, Key Bank
Movers and Shakers“I wanted to be a banker my whole life,” said Maria Coyne, Executive Vice President, Business Banking Segment Group at Key Bank. Coyne graduated with a degree in finance from Notre Dame in 1982, and besides a three year foray into the non profit sector, has spent her 25 year career in banking. While she has worked in just about every part of the bank, she said, she’s always come back to small business.
“It’s where my heart was,” she said. “Particularly the women’s business sector.”
Among her proudest achievements, Coyne includes the work she’s done with the Key4Women program – Key’s program for female business owners, providing financial solutions, networking opportunities, and education. She explained that, going back to the late ’90s, Key Bank was studying the needs of women business owners. “We saw that they just weren’t applying for loans.”
“We identified it as a need and wanted to make it real.” She said the program has gone a long way in helping understand the economic value in women-owned businesses. “This is not just a “feel good” project,” she said. “These women have sophisticated business needs.”
She continued, “The most thrilling thing for me has been to see these companies grow and expand through the program.”
In 2005, Key Bank has committed to lending $1 billion over the next three years, and accomplished that goal early in 2007. “So we said, ‘Let’s double it.’” That goal, she said, was achieved in 2009. The bank is on track to achieve its next goal of 3 billion by 2012.
On the horizon, Coyne said, is a program for non profit entities similar to Key4Women. “We want to help non profits find financial solutions. We’re very excited about it.” Additionally, Coyne said, so many of the bank’s employees sit on non profit boards that the program is energizing the entire leadership team. “We’re well suited to serve non profits,” she added.
Coyne is particularly excited about the financial education portion of the two programs.
She said, “I think financial education is so important in virtually every aspect of our industry. On the consumer side, particularly in the “unbanked,” there is heightened awareness around people better managing their finances. One of the good things that came out of this bad cycle is that we are building the tools to help people manage their finances better.”
Read more
Ask-a-Career-Coach: Is “Excessive Subjectivity” Sabotaging Your Career?
Ask A Career CoachOnce upon a time, when managers made implicitly gender-biased judgments about which staff got the pay raises and the promotions, we called a spade a spade: gender discrimination. When Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. v. Betty Dukes et al. was recently heard by the Supreme Court, we gained a new euphemism for structural sexism in the workplace: “excessive subjectivity.”
This phenomenon is no news to most women: When a company fails to establish objective criteria for its managers to decide on pay raises and promotions, then personal, subjective, unexamined biases kick in. And if you’re operating in a male-dominated environment, you can bet that those cultural biases ain’t gonna benefit the women. If the workplace lacks a rational process for making a decision (it’s called a “policy”), then bosses fall back on the most primitive assumptions, including sexist ones.
The result? In the case of Wal-Mart: Women fill 70% of the hourly jobs but make up only 33% of management employees. Women working in the company’s stores are paid less than men in every region, and the salary gap widens over time even for men and women hired into the same jobs at the same time.
Lawyers for the female employees argued that local managers exercise their discretion over pay and promotions disproportionately in favor of men, which has an unlawful disparate impact on female employees, and that Wal-Mart’s refusal to restrain its managers’ authority amounts to disparate treatment.
While the Supreme Court minority opinion, including all three female justices, found that excessive subjectivity was sufficient grounds to proceed with the class action suit, the majority did not. For reasons both technical and ideological, the Supreme Court reversed the lower court’s opinion that the women of Wal-Mart constitute a legitimate class with a common complaint. Women employees at Wal-Mart can move forward with gender discrimination suits, but on a smaller scale rather than as a single class.
As you can imagine, women’s advocates are dissatisfied with this diminished legal protection against gender discrimination in the workplace.
But not to despair! If you find yourself facing the invisible hand of excessive subjectivity, you are far from powerless.
Remember “subliminal advertising”? Take a page from that playbook and launch a subliminal counter-campaign of your own. Here are four simple, on-the-ground tactics to protect yourself from excessive subjectivity. These tactics will enable you to transform it into an objective framework for conversation, evaluation, and decision-making:
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A “Winner” Company or a “Zero”? Ranking System to Bring More Women to Boards
Industry Leaders, LeadershipThere’s nothing wrong with using the stage when you have it, and Diana Taylor, the former New York State Superintendent of Banks, did just that when she was recently honored for her leadership role by the Women’s Forum of New York City, a conclave of influential executive women.
Deftly, she worked into her remarks a clarion recruitment pitch. She looked out into the vast ornate ballroom of the Plaza Hotel and simply invited any interested party there to send her a CV to be considered for a seat on a Board in which she is involved. That is called casting the net widely, I thought—there were hundreds of qualified candidates in that room, and she was looking to recruit a woman for the position. This was an efficient use of a wide pool at hand.
But that was a “seize the day” appeal, the proverbial golden opportunity. Improving the representation of women on Boards appears to be one of those interminable journeys that needs permanent attention. Despite much discussion, we face stagnation in the ranks of women on Boards in the U.S. with the percentages sticking at just 11 percent for Fortune 1000 companies, according to Catalyst, which collects data on women in business.
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The Future of Work Life Fit
Work-Life“One of the things that surprised me was how significantly fear related to flex has gone down,” began Cali Yost, CEO and Founder of Work+Life Fit, Inc. Since 2006, Yost and her team have been studying attitudes toward work/life fit and flexible work schedules. This year, Yost said, the results were encouraging – not only is flex scheduling more the norm, but fewer people are concerned that it may harm their chances for higher pay or promotion.
That’s a good thing, Yost explained. “Flex is no longer a thing only a few people have and many are afraid of. Most of us have it in a different form. Now we need to move to the next step – how we can make it work.”
She added, “We have to make it as good as it can be.”
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Voice of Experience: Barbara Novick, Vice Chairman, BlackRock
Voices of ExperienceRight now, Barbara Novick, Vice Chairman at BlackRock, is focused energetically on change. “Companies and industries change, and very often change is an opportunity.”
Novick’s responsibilities have changed too – after twenty years working on the client side at BlackRock, she’s recently taken a new role leading public policy and government relations for the firm – and she feels strongly that change is leading to opportunities in this area too.
As the markets and regulatory structures evolve rapidly, she explained, people must be able to not only deal with change, but embrace it. She said, “Embracing change is probably the most important thing someone can do in their career, along with trying to turn that change into opportunity.”
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New UN Women Report Highlights Disparity Between Law and Practice
NewsThis week marked the release of UN Women‘s first report, Progress of the World’s Women 2011–2012: In Pursuit of Justice. UN Women was founded last July, in order to accelerate the UN’s progress toward achieving its gender equality goals.
The report produced some tidbits that may surprise you – for example, that women in Quatar earn 142% of what men earn in the manufacturing sector, or that women hold 51% of seats in Rwanda’s parliament.
But the report goes much deeper than that. The comprehensive study of women’s access to justice around the world is not intended to portray women as people who need protection, but to seek out ways to empower women and improve gender equality. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon wrote, “This edition of Progress of the World’s Women examines the injustice that far too many women endure. It also highlights how essential it is to see women as far more than victims, but as agents of change.”
The aim of the report is to acknowledge the global gap between what is set down in law and what really happens, and to establish goals in narrowing that gap.
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5 Ways to Get Male Executives to Invest in Women’s Initiatives
Men Who "Get It"Studies and statistics consistently point towards company benefits and increased profit margins when women are encouraged and emerge as leaders in the workplace. Consequently, companies are increasingly recognizing the importance of identifying and developing female executives. This movement parallels the success women feel when male senior executives become sponsors, mentors and champions of professional gender equality.
However, for those male senior executives who have not yet become involved with this effort, the question remains: how can we encourage and persuade them to invest in women’s initiatives? Here are 5 tips to consider.
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