Investment bank employee Shalini Mathur can’t speak too highly of Maternity
Matters, an initiative to support women who return to work started by her
bosses at Citi earlier this year.
Mathur, 35, a private banker in Citi’s global wealth management team, returned
to work at the firm’s Canary Wharf offices full time in January after having
her second child, who is now one year old. “After coming back I attended a
session called Managing the Balance,” she says. “It was very useful, all
about how to cope with home and work and kids. When you have two children it
is a very different ball game to when you have one.”
Mathur also had a one-to-one session with a psychologist, paid for by Citi, in
which she was counselled that she needed to build time for herself into her
weekly schedule - to exercise and relax - if she was to optimise her
energies. As a private banker Mathur works long hours and also has to
travel, as does her husband, a business consultant. Although she has a nanny
to look after the baby and her four-year-old, she says the Maternity Matters
scheme made her feel that the bank, where she has worked for the past six
years, valued and would support her as a working mother.
And right now, with redundancies rocking the finance sector and companies like
Citi, UBS and Merrill Lynch posting extraordinary losses, that’s a feeling
more women would like to enjoy. “It would take a lot for me to move to
another financial organisation,” said Mathur. “I even had a baby shower for
my second child in the office.”
In addition to running networking and executive coaching sessions for mums,
Maternity Matters trains managers to support new mothers. It is one of
several programmes run by top banks aimed at improving the number of women
who go back to highflying jobs after they start a family. Most leading
financial organisations are prepared to consider flexible and part-time
working deals for women trying to juggle family and career as well as
offering mentoring, assistance with childcare costs and even lunchtime
parenting classes.
Why? Quite simply because there are so few women in the upper echelons of FTSE
100 companies and the financial world generally. The banks want to ensure
they will be able to appoint more to senior positions, such as partner and
managing director, over the next few years.
The big question is whether, as has happened in the past, women executives
will be the first through the door in tough financial times. After America’s
dotcom bubble burst seven years ago, the percentage of women in the Wall
Street workforce dropped from 43% in 1999 to 37% in 2003. As the current
economic crisis tightens its grip, women are again among the casualties. One
of the most prominent is Zoe Cruz, tipped as the first female likely to
become boss of a Wall Street investment bank, but now considering her
options after being fired last November by Morgan Stanley, two years after
being made co-president.
This time round, there are predictions that organisations will also try to
save money by ditching “soft” retention programmes aimed at establishing a
more diverse profile at the very top of the business - coaching, mentoring
and parenting classes among them.
At Citi, women account for 14% of the firm’s board (two women out of 14). At
the professional services company Deloitte, which specialises in tax,
auditing and consulting, the percentage of female partners is 13%. Look at
the boards of most large banks and financial companies in the UK and the
proportion of women is between 10% and 15%, says Sharon Fraser, managing
partner for talent at Deloitte. Most financial organisations, she says, have
been competing to push the numbers higher.
Fraser, who has no children, was made a partner at Deloitte a decade ago. The
rewards are good: average earnings for partners at Deloitte last year were
£870,000, but while 50% of new recruits are women, many leave after they
become senior managers, which reduces the pool of talent from which partners
and directors can be chosen. Large numbers drop out after having children.
Lynda Gratton, professor of management practice at London Business School,
recently surveyed senior women in business - all team leaders earning more
than £100,000 a year - and found that 52% were childless and most of the
other 48% had only one child, By contrast, only 4% of senior men did not
have children. “It’s very hard for women to combine career and children,”
she says.
At Deloitte, Fraser wants to see the proportion of female partners climbing to
25%, more like the picture in America, though she acknowledges it may take a
decade to reach this goal. “We recruit all these brilliant people, then we
lose them,” says Fraser. “It’s not a good business model.”
How will the credit crunch affect such targets and the programmes that support
them? Executive coach Jonathan Thomson says that in the serious downturn of
the late 1990s, UK financial organisations operated a “slash and burn”
policy towards diversity initiatives.
This time round, while some programmes will be cut, there is more of a
commitment to retaining talented employees, including women and ethnic
minorities, he believes. Initiatives that help achieve this - particularly
if, like lunchtime parenting classes, they are not too expensive - will
survive.
“There is still a shortage of good people,” says Thomson, “and financial
organisations will carry on funding measures that attract them. All City
institutions will not pull the rug from initiatives such as these just
because there is a downturn. Some will, but others will not.”
Those in charge of talent management, diversity and recruitment in the City
concur. Carolanne Minashi, head of diversity for Europe, Middle East and
Africa at Citi, and a mother of four, says there are no plans to cut the
Maternity Matters programme. “We want to see greater female representation
in top leadership positions,” she says. “Despite this economic environment.
we are expanding our work on diversity.”
She admitted, however, that while requests to work flexibly were still being
granted, sometimes they were being scaled back - so that, for example, a
request to work three days a week might be turned down but one to work four
might be suggested instead.
Mona Lau, group head of diversity at UBS, which has developed a “gender index”
to monitor the number of women at different levels across the bank, says it
is committed to expanding their opportunities: “We want to make sure that
UBS is a true meritocracy and those women who want to get to the very top
can do this . . . despite the current difficult times, the recent cuts at
UBS have not disproportionately hurt our women employees.”
A mother of two teenagers, Lau designed a programme recently launched in
several countries where UBS operates. Called Career Comeback, it is aimed at
former female financial high-flyers who are keen, after a career break, to
succeed again.
Glenda Stone, chief executive of Aurora, which supplies HR software and
marketing services to blue-chip companies, argues that while financial firms
remain committed to policy objectives on paper, in practice some initiatives
are being scaled down as the credit crunch bites. “Diversity initiatives are
part of how many companies do business. They will keep them during both bear
and bull markets,” she says - but “the quality and volume of those
initiatives may decrease”.
Stone claims that some staff within the banks whose job it is to promote
diversity are losing their jobs. “Diversity teams are being cut back . . .
we are losing some of our contacts in diversity areas in the banks.”
And it’s not just HR staff. One mother working in the financial sector, who
asked to remain anonymous, said that she was threatened with redundancy and
warned that women asking for flexible working or a part-time contract were
vulnerable in the current climate.
It was hugely disappointing, she said. In the City, “it’s impossible to get a
part-time position at the moment . . . they just don’t exist. If you want to
work only two or three days a week, forget it”.
Back at Citi, Monica Gibson, who works full-time on the trading floor and is
the mother of a one-year-old, says that she could see why overstretched
working mothers could in principle be vulnerable in the current climate. “If
you are required to do the extra mile and you cannot do it - and there are
other people who can - it could be a problem. But I haven’t seen it myself.”
Case study: Citi
MONICA GIBSON, 29, who works on the trading floor at Citi bank, returned to
work full-time after having her son Aaron, now a year old. She is one of
several employees using the Maternity Matters service launched this year for
Citi’s female staff.
Gibson, left, who starts work at 6am and leaves 12 hours later, values the
opportunity to talk to other mothers at the firm. “You can voice your fears
and ask questions,” she says.
“For the first couple of months things were quite volatile,” Gibson admits.
“Aaron was sick, catching infections from other children at his nursery. I
felt I was taking liberties saying I had to leave but no-one said, ‘Monica,
you are taking the mick’. The empathy is there.”
I welcome every measure being taken by the Banks to value women. There is a broader issue that needs to be addressed and that is the issue of culture and this affects men too and is currenlty highlighted by new Grads. Implicit assumptions must be challenged! www.eve-olution.net
Tracey Carr, Guildford, UK