11.4.21
Leadership, Representation, and Gender Equity in Financial Services
Two years ago, Within reach 2019 offered a cautiously optimistic outlook on the career advancement and leadership opportunities for women professionals at financial services institutions. Then came COVID-19, straining the resources of organizations, management teams, and individual employees around the world to maintain communication, productivity, and personal lives when nearly everyone was confined to their residences.
The unprecedented challenges seen by the pandemic may have slowed the momentum we had seen toward gender parity in leadership roles. However, as Deloitte notes in Within reach 2021, it also shifted a closer eye by firms toward broader corporate responsibility, embedding diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) elements into their strategies, policies, and overall missions.
Looking back, the recognized abilities of women leaders to drive collaborative activity have proven especially effective in the remote work environment.
Today, as companies now move to a hybrid work environment, wherein some staff are primarily in the office while others largely work from home and occasionally schedule in-person meetings with colleagues and clients, the essential issues of 2019 remain:
- Implementing gender equity policies to hire, retain, and promote women;
- Ensuring the visibility of women, regardless of their in-office or at-home work environment;
- Leveraging the multiplier effect, whereby one woman in the C-suite is correlated with three women in senior management roles;
- Tapping the return-to-work talent pool.
Organizations in banking, capital markets, investment management, insurance, and real estate are again reminded of the specific steps they have taken—and programs they are impelled to continue—to train and mentor female staff, develop a pipeline of talent, and promote women into senior management and C-suite roles.