By Melissa J. Anderson (New York City)
In honor of Pride Month, The Glass Hammer is featuring an interview with PwC’s Susan Siegmund, the first female partner to sit on the firm’s GLBT Advisory Board. Siegmund’s personal story illustrates the value of GLBT support in the workplace.
Susan Siegmund is a Fort Worth, Texas, based audit partner at PricewaterhouseCoopers and the first female partner to sit on the firm’s GLBT Advisory Board. PwC’s GLBT Advisory Board – the first of its kind among the Big Four firms – is comprised of openly gay partners and professionals with varied tenures, skills and life experiences. The group provides visible role models for PwC’s GLBT professionals and advises firm leadership on the planning and implementation of GLBT initiatives.
“What we are trying to achieve at PwC is making sure everybody is comfortable – that we are bringing our whole selves to work,” explained Siegmund. “We’re trying to build a culture of inclusion, bringing together all of our experiences and stories.”
Siegmund’s own story was a major factor in her decision to get involved in PwC’s GLBT community in the first place, and later to take a more active leadership role.
“I’m excited but also anxious about stepping out and being a role model. I’ve always been more of a private person – I’m a little out of my comfort zone,” she said.
She joined the firm in 1988, and for the majority of her career didn’t think it was important to make a big deal about being out at work. But a relationship she began in September 2001 changed her perspective. “I started a relationship with Teresa,” she said, referring to her partner Teresa Martin. Eventually, Siegmund came out to her family and the two moved in together.
“Over the next few years, I still didn’t come out at work. I thought people already knew. I really didn’t think I was hiding it. Teresa would come to various work functions or parties, but I never formally introduced her as my life partner or my domestic partner,” she explained.
It wasn’t until a crisis forced Siegmund to come out to her colleagues that she realized the value of being open at work.
Voice of Experience: Yvonne Schneider, Senior Vice President Global Commercial Services Technologies, American Express
Voices of ExperienceBy Melissa J. Anderson (New York City)
Yvonne Schneider is a panelist at today’s Women in IT event, hosted by The Glass Hammer.
“I consider myself a global leader,” said Yvonne Schneider, SVP Global Commercial Services Technologies at American Express. “I align employees across five regions around the world and we’re a high performing team. My employees have a lot of responsibility and visibility.”
Schneider’s role at Amex is about managing – and creating – change. She works to create and deploy new solutions to the company’s global corporate client base, she explained. “The adoption of emerging technologies is something we’re paying a lot of attention to. But it’s a matter of putting the right technology at the right time in the right market – the same technology is not the right solution everywhere in the world.”
“What we do is work on automating the workforce,” she said, “and this is changing the face of the world and how it operates and its people.”
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More Women Leaders: Time For A Different Approach
Industry Leaders, LeadershipOne definition of insanity is to do the same thing again and again and expect a different result. If we want more women in senior leadership positions we need to take a different approach. The current one isn’t working.
We’ve repeatedly called on Board Directors and C-suite executives to act on the strong business case for appointing more female colleagues, with minimal impact.
The 2009 Catalyst Census of Fortune 500 Women Board Directors revealed that less than one fifth of companies have three or more women on their boards, and more than 40 percent have no women directors whatsoever.
At the last count, women comprised only 15.2 and 13.5 percent of board directors and corporate officers respectively in Fortune 500 companies.
The United States is not alone in its boys club mentality. Canada’s Financial Post 500 companies have only 14 percent female board directors, and 16.9 percent corporate officers. Similarly, women hold only 9.7 percent board positions in Europe’s top 300 companies.
Research shows companies with at least three female board members, and more women in senior leadership roles, produce stronger-than-average financial and organizational results. But the boys at the top just aren’t buying it.
It’s time to stop banging our heads against the same brick wall and instead, think more broadly about where we might influence change.
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New AXA Study Shows More Women Saving for Retirement
NewsAccording to a new study released by AXA Equitable Life Insurance Company, twice as many women than men said their top financial worry was not being able to save enough for retirement. This is for good reason, too. Though many were hit hard by the recent financial crisis, women in particular took a major blow, with fewer women than men able to recover their retirement savings investments.
One of the biggest champions behind this study, entitled Retirement in America: A Survey of Concerns and Expectations, was Barbara Goodstein, AXA’s Executive Vice President, Chief Innovation Officer. For the past three years, Goodstein was part of the team that conducted extensive research on women’s financial goals. According to the Goodstein, when considering the hardships women face as they get older, it should come as no surprise that they’re more concerned about retirement.
“Women are more concerned for their financial future because they find themselves in very different positions than men later in life,” Goodstein said. “In many cases, women make about 80 percent of what men make doing similar work. Over the span of their lifetime, men work about twelve years longer than women. Women live longer than men and 40 percent of marriages end in divorce. When you consider these facts, it becomes clear that many single women and widows are likely to face retirement alone and all of the financial difficulties that come with that.”
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Lawyer or Mom: Choose Only One?
Work-LifeAs the confirmation hearings on Elena Kagan conclude, one question remains unanswered. What does Kagan’s nomination mean for American lawyer moms?
While the nomination of Kagan has been lauded as groundbreaking – setting the stage for three women sitting on the Supreme Court for the first time in American history – the nomination also marks the second time in about a year that President Obama has chosen a childless woman to replace a male justice on the Court.
That Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan are unmarried and childless has many commentators speculating about the choices women today must make in order to achieve heights in their chosen careers, particularly in the legal field.
Indeed, few American lawyers, answering honestly, would cite coincidence that both Sotomayor and Kagan are childless and highly successful lawyers. Most call Kagan and Sotomayor’s paths ones of personal choice. No doubt. But framing the relevant issue as one of choice between children and career leaves American moms feeling marginalized. American lawyer moms? Even more so.
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Voice of Experience: Margo Cook, CFA, Executive Vice President, Nuveen Investments
Voices of ExperienceIn talking to Margo Cook, CFA, Executive Vice President of Nuveen Investments, its clear that what she’s valued the most throughout her career is her ability to be a part of and to build effective teams.
While her career has taken her from The Bank of New York to Bear Stearns Asset Management, and now to Nuveen Investments, she continues to prize her role as a manager and team builder, investigating and working to improve the dynamic and effectiveness of the groups she’s led.
Cook said, “The most rewarding thing is to have a strong team that works together well. They know how to respond to challenges, and move ahead. It may be more time consuming – but a strong team can accomplish more than a group of people acting as individuals.”
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Happy Independence Day!
NewsThe Glass Hammer is taking a long weekend to celebrate Independence Day. If you’re not out watching the fireworks, why not take a few minutes to catch up on a few of our recent most popular stories?
And, don’t forget to check out our Thursday, July 8 event: Women in IT – Staying Technical and Getting to the Top. We’re also planning two more events for this fall, so keep an eye on our events page!
Finally, The Glass Hammer is always looking for more writers. Do you have a story to tell? Email me at melissa@theglasshammer.com and we’ll talk about putting your voice on the site!
The Heart of Risk Management? Data
NewsAt the heart of risk management is data management. This is according to three speakers at the Securities Information and Financial Markets Association’s (SIFMA) Technology Expo. Edward Hida, partner at Deloitte & Touche, Keith Sexton, the global director of the financial markets at IBM, and Chris Church, the CEO of SWIFT Americas were all given the opportunity to explain how their companies were tackling risk management.
Deloitte Surveys Market Participants For Answers
Deloitte & Touche interviewed regulators, securities broker-dealers, banks, insurance companies, hedge funds, and exchanges to find out how they defined and viewed systemic risk. They also set out to discover what information was needed from these financial institutions to identify, measure and monitor systemic risk.
What they came up with was a variety of approaches involving regulators, clearing houses and financial institutions that would help manage and measure a firm’s exposure to risk. The range of solutions involved regulators developing stress tests and financial institutions performing, analyzing and reporting the results as well as regulators developing a consistent standard for enterprise-wide risk reporting across the market.
Hida also described an approach that involved building a trade repository where firms would provide data and where regulators and clearing houses could measure and monitor that information in terms of risk exposure.
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Ask-A-Career-Coach: How Do You Position Yourself for Two Different Careers?
Ask A Career CoachI had a client who had started a business that needed a cash infusion. At the same time, recognizing that cash flow was an issue, he started to explore going back in-house (he had been a successful banker before starting his own shop). He needed to position himself as both an entrepreneur and an employee without diluting either focus or confusing his market. How do you position yourself for two different careers?
I see this conundrum more and more. On the entrepreneur/ employee front, more people are starting side businesses or picking up consulting projects. But even when one is committed to traditional employment, jobs are wider in scope and you may find yourself with a role that is a compilation of several different functions. I reconnected with an old hire of mine from my media days, and she was straddling PR and marketing in the same firm. Consequently, she was unsure how to talk about both without diminishing her experience in either.
Positioning is framed by two things: who you are; and what you are targeting. So the above conundrum seems to revolve around the first half – confusion on how to express who you are. But it really is more about the second – describing who you are in the context of your target. If you are sure about your target, you can easily find a way to talk about your two (or more) sides in a way that adds value to your target and therefore makes you the logical choice, not the outlier.
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Voice of Experience: Susan Siegmund, Partner, PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP
NewsIn honor of Pride Month, The Glass Hammer is featuring an interview with PwC’s Susan Siegmund, the first female partner to sit on the firm’s GLBT Advisory Board. Siegmund’s personal story illustrates the value of GLBT support in the workplace.
Susan Siegmund is a Fort Worth, Texas, based audit partner at PricewaterhouseCoopers and the first female partner to sit on the firm’s GLBT Advisory Board. PwC’s GLBT Advisory Board – the first of its kind among the Big Four firms – is comprised of openly gay partners and professionals with varied tenures, skills and life experiences. The group provides visible role models for PwC’s GLBT professionals and advises firm leadership on the planning and implementation of GLBT initiatives.
“What we are trying to achieve at PwC is making sure everybody is comfortable – that we are bringing our whole selves to work,” explained Siegmund. “We’re trying to build a culture of inclusion, bringing together all of our experiences and stories.”
Siegmund’s own story was a major factor in her decision to get involved in PwC’s GLBT community in the first place, and later to take a more active leadership role.
“I’m excited but also anxious about stepping out and being a role model. I’ve always been more of a private person – I’m a little out of my comfort zone,” she said.
She joined the firm in 1988, and for the majority of her career didn’t think it was important to make a big deal about being out at work. But a relationship she began in September 2001 changed her perspective. “I started a relationship with Teresa,” she said, referring to her partner Teresa Martin. Eventually, Siegmund came out to her family and the two moved in together.
“Over the next few years, I still didn’t come out at work. I thought people already knew. I really didn’t think I was hiding it. Teresa would come to various work functions or parties, but I never formally introduced her as my life partner or my domestic partner,” she explained.
It wasn’t until a crisis forced Siegmund to come out to her colleagues that she realized the value of being open at work.
Read more
Getting Out of the Gender Ghetto
Industry Leaders, Leadership“It’s time to get serious about sex”, declared Avivah Wittenberg-Cox in 2008, at the NYC launch of her book, Why Women Mean Business. Co-authored with Financial Times contributor Alison Maitland, the book took the economic arguments for gender change to the heart of the corporate world and spelled out in no uncertain terms that gender diversity is an economic necessity and is good for women, men, companies and their clients.
Two years later, we’re in a very different, credit-crunched corporate world and Wittenberg-Cox is back with the sequel: How Women Mean Business, subtitled – “A step by step guide to profiting from gender balanced business”. The book was launched last week at a London event hosted by Nomura, where the author guided her audience of both men and women through a frank and witty multimedia presentation of the issues covered in her new offering.
“The twentieth century is over. The reality of the world has changed. The last century was driven by manufacturing and the twenty-first century is wrapped up in customer services and technology”, explained Wittenberg-Cox.
“And gender balance has a huge role to play in this transformation.”
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