By Elizabeth Harrin (London)
Barbara-Ann King is not your stereotypical stockbroker. In May this year she will be jumping out of a plane to raise money for Breakthrough Breast Cancer. “I am a great believer in giving things a try, because if it does not work out you can try something else,” she says, “and I believe that leadership, or the best leaders, are those who are willing to go outside their comfort zone.”
King took another leap over ten years ago, when she moved from a legal and management consultancy career to alternative investment management. It turned out to be a shrewd move, as she has risen through the financial services ranks to become Head of Investments at Barclays Stockbrokers. However, it wasn’t a structured step on her career journey. “To be honest there was no master plan, it just happened,” she explains. “I was working on a project that involved private equity and got head hunted by a bank for a role that I had no interest in, fed this back and was then asked to consider another role in the start up of a ‘new’ department of alternative investments – the industry was not even called that at the time, it was called ‘special funds’.”
King liked the team at Citigroup and sees herself as a natural entrepreneur and ‘builder’ so she gave the role at serious consideration – and took it. “It sounded fun so I took a leap of faith,” she says. “It turned into a multi billion revenue business and with it I moved to New York and took a global senior management role.”
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SEC Changes Help Women in the Boardroom
NewsIn July of 2009, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) proposed a number of revisions to their rules. These amendments were designed to improve the amount of disclosure shareholders of public companies receive as it pertains to: compensation policies and practices that present material risks to the company, stock and option awards of executives and directors, director and nominee qualifications and legal proceedings, board leadership structure, the board’s role in risk oversight, and potential conflicts of interest of compensation consultants that advice companies and their board of directors.
At the time, the major hope was that these amendments would enable shareholders to better evaluate the leadership of public companies, but it quickly became clear that – if adopted – these new rules could greatly assist in promoting true diversity in the boardroom.
In response to these proposed revisions, the SEC received over 130 comment letters from various organizations offering their opinions and suggestions on the proposed amendments. Not only did the SEC take these opinions into consideration, but they even adopted several of the amendments to their rules late last year. One of the organizations that responded to the SEC’s rule revisions with a comment letter was the InterOrganization Network (ION), a nearly six-year-old organization dedicated to advancing the number of women in leadership positions as corporate directors and executive officers. Of particular interest to ION was the SEC’s decision to require disclosure of the qualifications of “directors and nominees for directors and the reasons why the person should serve as director of the company.”
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Why it is Important for Men to Support Women Breaking the Glass Ceiling
Men Who "Get It"When I began researching glass ceilings there were questions as to why a man was tackling the issue of in the first place. After all, this is a women’s issue, isn’t it?
My personal reason for supporting women breaking glass ceilings is very simple. My mom was part of the first all-women insurance sales team in Iowa for American Mutual Life in the early 1960s. Her career aspirations were thwarted due to factors related to the glass ceiling. Mom is 82 now and the question “what might have been” often comes to mind when I think of how far my mom’s career could have gone if not for the artificial barriers that held her back.
Now, as I look at my step-daughter, nieces, and great-nieces, I don’t want to have to look at their careers and ask, “What might have been?” But that’s me. Why, then, should other men take up the cause? Quite simply, it is in the best interests of our economy and our society to do so.
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Voice of Experience: Lynn Tilton, CEO, Patriarch Partners
Voices of ExperienceImage courtesy cnbc.com.
Over the course of her 28-year long career, Lynn Tilton has walked a winding road from Yale to her current position as CEO of Patriarch Partners, a $7 billion investment firm.
At the age of 25, Lynn Tilton was the single mother of a 2 year old, working 100 hours a week and putting herself through business school. An overachiever from a young age, Tilton played on the national tennis circuit while growing up and went on to play tennis for Yale. Her life turned upside down when her father died during her junior year. “Until that point, I was a golden girl, a nationally ranked tennis player and Yale student. That’s where my world all unraveled and started to change.”
She continued, “The number one loss is death of a working parent because it causes the family structure to change and the children to be left behind.”
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A New, Sophisticated Take on Personal Finance for Women
Pipeline, What's On“Reading a book about personal finance sounds like the worst thing I’ve ever heard of,” joked Alexa von Tobel, CEO and Founder of LearnVest.com, a website designed to “provide trusted personal finance education in a simple, easy-to-understand manner and help women everywhere take control of their finances.”
Personal finance is a subject von Tobel recognized as crucial a few years ago, as a senior at Harvard University. She had just been accepted to Harvard Business School, and was about to begin a career as a hedge fund trader at Morgan Stanley – and yet, with all of her business education and experience, she says, she had absolutely “no clue” about what to do about her own personal finances.
“Very few schools actually teach the basics of personal finance – which actually affects every day of your life,” she explained. “We want to educate as many women as possible.”
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Women Fleeing Tech Field: Causes and Solutions
Managing ChangeOver the last two decades, the computer science industry has seen almost a mass exodus of women – while other science fields have seen the number of jobs held by women rise significantly.
According to a new report by the National Center for Women & Information Technology (NCWIT), the percentage of computer-related jobs held by women has declined steadily from its high of 36% in 1991, to just above 25% in 2008.
Dr. Catherine Ashcraft, co-author (with Sarah Blithe) of Women in IT: The Facts, explained that there are a number of reasons for the decline:
But it’s not just a decline in the number of women entering the field – women are leaving jobs in the technology field at a startling rate.
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SEC Actions Concern Market Participants at STAC Conference
News“Blame, Blame, Blame, Ban, Ban, Ban, Tax, Tax, Tax,” were the first words in Congresswomen Judy Biggert’s keynote address at the Security Traders Association of Chicago’s (STAC) 85th Annual Mid-Winter Meeting last week, to describe actions coming out of Washington. Her regulatory concerns were familiar ones.
Congresswomen Biggert spoke critically of Congress and her opposition of H.R. 1068, a bill to tax distressed securities transactions. She also expressed concern over the OTC regulations coming out of Washington which she described as “sorry excuses for reform,” giving too much power to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC).
She commented on the way the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) approached short selling, which is a strategy investors use to profit from falling stock prices. Congresswomen Biggert believed that the SEC was wrong in their temporary ban of short selling, saying that it provided positive price discovery and liquidity.
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Ask-A-Career Coach: How Does a Company Select From a Big Pile of Resumes?
Ask A Career Coach, NewsI was recently on a recruiting project, helping out a non-profit with dozens of open jobs. You would not know there is 10% unemployment at this place because they can’t hire fast enough to keep up with their needs. I see this feast or famine phenomenon often as a recruiter – either the company has nothing and no reason to call people in; or they are so busy, they don’t have the time to call people in.
Either way, companies are likely not going to call people in for interviews.
WHAT?!?! Am I saying that companies need to find the best and the brightest but they won’t take the time to do that? Yes, I am saying exactly that.
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Should Women Act Like ‘Self Aggrandizing Jerks’?
Breaking the Glass CeilingIn a recent blog post, Clay Shirky, a world-famous new media scholar and consultant, wrote, “not enough women have what it takes to behave like arrogant self-aggrandizing jerks.”
This is bad for women, he reasons, because, “people who don’t raise their hands don’t get called on, and people who raise their hands timidly get called on less. Some of this is because assertive people get noticed more easily, but some of it is because raising your hand is itself a high-cost signal that you are willing to risk public failure in order to try something.”
Men, on the other hand, seem to have less of a problem with stretching the facts in order to promote themselves. “There is no upper limit to the risks men are willing to take in order to succeed, and if there is an upper limit for women, they will succeed less.”
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Helping Professional Women Band Together and Build Strengths
Featured, NetworkingThere has been a noticeable change in the way women help other women in the workforce.
“In the past 10 years, I have seen a huge push among senior level women who are passionate about mentoring,” said Jo Miller, Founder of Women’s Leadership Coaching “to help emerging women leaders gain access to networks, role models and opportunities.”
Miller offers seminars, coaching programs and webinars that are designed for businesswomen to create roadmaps into leadership positions. She launched a webinar series as a cost-effective solution for career advancement and advice. Divided into two categories to meet the needs of emerging and executive leaders, the webinars feature speakers who have broken through the glass ceiling and want to share their experiences with other like-minded women.
Miller also speaks at seminars and workshops regarding career advancement for women. Topics include winning at the game of office politics, creating your own brand as an emerging leader and becoming a person of influence.
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Voice of Experience: Barbara-Ann King, Head of Investments, Barclays Stockbrokers
Voices of ExperienceBarbara-Ann King is not your stereotypical stockbroker. In May this year she will be jumping out of a plane to raise money for Breakthrough Breast Cancer. “I am a great believer in giving things a try, because if it does not work out you can try something else,” she says, “and I believe that leadership, or the best leaders, are those who are willing to go outside their comfort zone.”
King took another leap over ten years ago, when she moved from a legal and management consultancy career to alternative investment management. It turned out to be a shrewd move, as she has risen through the financial services ranks to become Head of Investments at Barclays Stockbrokers. However, it wasn’t a structured step on her career journey. “To be honest there was no master plan, it just happened,” she explains. “I was working on a project that involved private equity and got head hunted by a bank for a role that I had no interest in, fed this back and was then asked to consider another role in the start up of a ‘new’ department of alternative investments – the industry was not even called that at the time, it was called ‘special funds’.”
King liked the team at Citigroup and sees herself as a natural entrepreneur and ‘builder’ so she gave the role at serious consideration – and took it. “It sounded fun so I took a leap of faith,” she says. “It turned into a multi billion revenue business and with it I moved to New York and took a global senior management role.”
Read more