Women often don’t think of themselves as leaders,” says Karen Peetz, when we ask her why so few women occupy the boardroom even in the developed world. That’s an honest answer, but also a strange one for a woman who seems to revel in taking on gigantic challenges herself.
After all, we have just read Karen’s overwhelming profile as we step into the Ascendas Chennai office of BNY Mellon’s subsidiary iNautix Technologies to meet her.
As the President of one of the world’s largest banks with (hold your breath!) $26 trillion in assets under custody, Karen personally oversees BNY Mellon’s client management, human resources and treasury functions.
As a finance industry professional, she was instrumental in executing the US government’s Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) to rescue banks after the housing bubble burst.
Called on to help her alma mater, she chaired the board of trustees of Pennsylvania State University in the immediate aftermath of the Jerry Sandusky sex abuse scandal.
As a mother of twins, she took just a four-month break for maternity before resuming work.
As the conversation progresses, it is clear that Karen’s opinions on women in the workplace are not really contradictory. As she explains, what holds back most women from getting ahead in the corporate world is not the lack of ability, but the lack of confidence and active mentors who can give them a leg-up.
Excerpts from the conversation:
In India, we don’t find too many women in boardrooms. Actually we have a new Company Law that mandates at least one woman on the board. But companies say there aren’t many women qualified for the job. Why do you think this is so?
The number one issue is the responsibilities that women have at home — whether it is their children or family. To strike a work-life balance becomes even more difficult when they reach a level at the workplace that demands longer work hours. In the US, for instance, the number of women joining up for a computer programme or engineering course are few so the probability of them reaching the top is much less.
But there’s more to this issue. The Harvard Business Review did a detailed study on leadership. It found that, unfortunately, women and minorities don’t tend to think of themselves as leaders as easily as white males do. And when they reach the middle-level management hierarchy, where they need to differentiate through leading, they are not able to do it.
McKinsey did a similar study to understand the reasons for fewer women at the top. They came up with four factors that routinely held back women — the lack of a role model, the lack of mentors, prejudice in the workplace and women’s prejudices about themselves. That pretty much sums it up.
So, at BNY Mellon we are actively working on fixing these issues. In terms of mentorship, we have formal programmes where people choose their mentors and we point out women in senior positions as role models. Prejudice has to be tackled directly. So we need to start early, at the junior level, to change women’s perception of themselves.
Is it just a matter of offering women flexible timings so they can stick on and strike a better balance? We’ve just had the Yahoo! chief, a woman, speaking out against flexible working hours.
Not really. I would rather stay with the leadership issue and the fact that women tend to give up as things start to get tough.
On flexible hours, the concern really is that one does end up taking a cut on the pay or prospects of promotion later on because one opted for it. So as I see it, in a workplace, this (fixed hours) is the way the game is played and the women need to be in the game to play it. One advantage of flexible hours, however, is that it gives women a way to stay with their career and catch up later on, when they get more time to dedicate to work. Reaching out to women who have quit earlier and offering them flexible hours, could be one way by which organisations can bring back good talent.
There is talk of getting women on company boards or the Parliament through a quota system. What are your thoughts on such reservations?
I don’t like quotas. They diminish the accomplishment of a person. You should really focus on getting women to be accomplished in business rather than offering quotas. Only then will the women also prove to be good board members. Otherwise, if they are put over their head, more than they are qualified to handle, they are bound to fail.
You’re chairperson for the Women’s Initiative Network, which aims to give women in banking a leg-up in their career. What has it accomplished?
Many times, women don’t network effectively or recognise the importance of mentoring because they’re all about getting the job done. But those things are important to achieving career goals and shouldn’t be overlooked. That’s one of the reasons we created a network at BNY Mellon called the Women’s Initiative Network, or WIN, which is a formal programme for professional development, which in a short period of time has grown to more than 50 chapters globally with thousands of members. WIN offers members many sessions and experiences on mentoring, networking and obtaining the skills needed for growing our business. It’s been a great success.
You are an advocate for diversity in the workplace. How many women are employed in BNY Mellon?
Our workforce is equally split between men and women, with more women at the lower levels of hierarchy. We have three women in our executive committee. Overall, four out of 14 members in the executive committee are women or are from a multi-cultural workforce. In the next level down, which is called the operating committee, we have about 15 per cent made up of women and multi-cultural employees. In the next level below that, the proportion is about 35 per cent and then, at the last level, it is equally split.