![]() ![]() Sponsorship is one way to address some of these challenges. It’s a very tight range at which you have to figure out the game, how to play it, and how to deliver,” she notes. If you can stand with confidence and believe in your abilities, you earn your way out of the deficit, so to speak. “You come in on probation at a deficit and needing to prove your worth more than your counterparts versus coming in with support and the belief that there’s a reason you’re at the table. Facing compounded bias due to both their race and their gender, they must work doubly hard to prove themselves. Moreover, they are more likely to view “playing the game” and being well liked as critical to success (exhibit).Īs a woman of color, Beverly Anderson, head of cards and retail services at Wells Fargo, observes that women of color often enter financial careers at an inherent disadvantage. Senior-level women of color are more likely to view any failure, big or small, as having jeopardized their success. Women of color face unique challenges and often feel that they are held to a higher standard. Of entry-level women of color, 36 percent desire to become a senior executive-a proportion nearing that of their male peers-versus 22 percent of white women. These trends are especially troubling considering that more women of color than their white female peers express an ambition to make it to the top. Attrition rates for women of color are also higher than those for white women in entry-level and middle-management roles. One factor is lower promotion rates: at nearly every step in the pipeline, women of color in financial services are promoted at lower rates than both men and white women. Across the 39 financial-services companies we surveyed, there are only ten women of color in C-suite roles today. In the financial-services industry, women of color represent one in five employees at entry levels, but they virtually disappear from representation at higher levels. Furthermore, companies that do not focus on gender diversity will find themselves at a disadvantage in the war for talent. 4 Chris Metinko, “Women are the new CFO of the household,” The Street, April 19, 2017,. This is particularly critical in financial services, given that more than half of women now control their household finances and are responsible for household savings and investing. Improved representation of female leaders will lead to a more rounded view of customers. 3 Sundiatu Dixon-Fyle, Vivian Hunt, Sara Prince, and Lareina Yee, Delivering through diversity, January 2018. Furthermore, companies in the top quartile for ethnic/cultural diversity on executive teams were 33 percent more likely to have industry-leading profitability. (see sidebar “Gender parity by the numbers”). ![]() McKinsey’s research has shown that companies in the top quartile for gender diversity on executive teams were 21 percent more likely to outperform on profitability and 27 percent more likely to demonstrate superior value creation 2 Measured as economic profit margin. This commitment makes clear business sense: companies with greater gender diversity perform better. More than 90 percent of financial-services companies surveyed assert a commitment to gender diversity. Although the data are based on North American research, we believe the insights and implications have global relevance. and interviewed 12 female senior executives at financial-services companies in North America. As part of Women in the Workplace’s effort to create the definitive fact base on women’s advancement in leadership, we surveyed more than 14,000 employees at 39 financial-services companies 1 Combined, the 39 financial-services companies employ approximately 1.2 million people survey respondents were selected from nonfrontline employees, which totaled 575,000. Our research for Women in the Workplace, a collaborative initiative between LeanIn.Org and McKinsey, examines the gender-parity gap in financial services and looks at what can be done to close it. There is much work to be done to achieve gender parity in the financial-services sector. ![]() Despite this progress, women still represent fewer than one in five positions in the financial-services C-suite. They have reached the highest levels within companies, and their numbers at the top continue to grow, albeit slowly. In North America, women account for over half of the entry-level workforce in financial services. After 32 years in the financial-services industry, what’s most encouraging to me is that the topic of gender diversity is on fire. ![]()
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