International Women’s Day: banking on women

SRP is celebrating International Women’s Day by highlighting senior women in the structured products industry and asking them about progress made and the obstacles still to overcome.

International Women’s Day was born in the New York sweat shops, where female textile workers suffered crowded, unsanitary conditions, long working days, and poverty wages. Highly skilled women were often trapped in a category known as ‘learners’, earning a fraction of the wages of the semi-skilled, and a pittance in comparison with the almost exclusively male pattern-makers and cutters. On 8 March 1908 hundreds of these women decided enough was enough. They gathered in Rutgers Square on Manhattan’s Lower East Side to form their own union and to demand the right to vote.

These days, as we celebrate women’s achievements on 8 March, we remain mindful that for all our progress, those textile workers’ aspirations for gender equality have still not been fully realised in any industry, not least in financial services, despite genuine advances and outstanding examples like Norway’s DNB Bank and Bank of America (US).

Price Waterhouse Cooper remarked in its 2022 report on the gender pay gap in UK financial services that the sector, “has one of the highest pay gaps of all UK sectors and progress being made in closing this gap… has been slow.”* Reuters’ analysis of pay gap data from 21 major financial institutions in April 2020 thus showed an average mean gender pay gap of 32.1%, far wider than the general UK average of 14.9%. Investment banks were among the worst offenders, despite often having high profile in-house programmes to address workplace gender inequality. The UK arm of Goldman Sachs International, for example, had the widest gender pay gap among the firms Reuters surveyed, with men earning an average 51.3% more per hour than women.**

Across the broader financial services industry, the inequality reflects the predominance of women in in clerical and auxiliary roles, as well as what has been called the ‘broken first rung’ of the career ladder, which sees women fail to make it into managerial grades. In this environment, even advances in working practices can be disadvantageous to women.

For example, a slew of recent studies by institutions as varied as The Female Lead and King’s College, the Chartered Management Institute, and Deloitte, show that despite its obvious advantages for women juggling careers and domestic duties, hybrid working can compound workplace gender inequality, causing women workers to become invisible or hit a ‘hybrid career ceiling’.

Naturally, the structured products industry does not escape this inequality. We have, however, our own pioneers – women who have led teams through business transformations, and on ground-breaking deals, who have smashed the glass ceiling at a young age, who have provided crucial services to manufacturers and distributers, and who are leading in-house efforts to reduce inequality and promote diversity.

We only have the space to hear from five of them – but we celebrate them all.

What achievement are you most proud of within the structured products industry?

Isabell Millat: “When I was working at SG in New York we teamed up with a few female colleagues to re-launch the SG Americas Women Network, which organised networking events with peers from the industry in order to showcase women leaders -- events that welcomed both women and men! Most recently, I’m proud that I was able to make sustainability an essential component of our Global Markets division’s strategy; I’m convinced that creating a role to embody our Sustainability ambitions has helped focus the effort and grow engagement with our clients on their sustainability needs, a critical element success.”

Diana Van Maasdijk: “Setting up Equileap – I realised that when I looked at ESG investing, no one was talking about gender equality, and measuring it in a way that would allow investors to support companies that were striving for diversity, from the leadership levels to the supply chain. At times, it has been a battle to get people to include gender equality in ESG strategies, but now there are numerous products and institutional investors that incorporate our data into their responsible investing strategies, and we are channelling billions into companies that are striving to do the right thing. There is a long way to go, but I’m proud of how my team is a catalyst for positive social change when it comes to promoting global gender equality in the workplace.”

Anna Pinedo: “Having built a strong diverse derivatives and structured products team that has come to be known for its breadth and depth and for expertise with innovative products.”

Maryline Mertz: “I think, overall, having managed to consolidate and centralise our entire origination and issuance activities globally and across equities and FICC, and front to back, is something I'm very proud of and that is unique to Goldman. Once we had achieved that we were able to cater for all clients' needs, retail or institutional. It has increased not only the quality of execution for clients, but also allowed us to respond in a more efficient manner to the increased regulatory activities we have seen in the sector. Mifid II and Priip Kids, for example, have been a very large project. We're happy with how Goldman took a lead on this project, helping form solutions for the entire industry.”

Armelle Loeb: “Most recently I was appointed as a member of the STOXX Management Board, which is a personal achievement I’m very proud of. At a product level, I would probably mention some strategies we have developed as part of our range of indices designed for structured products, which have marked turning points in our industry like low volatility/high dividend optimised indices, decrement indices or more recently single stock decrement indices.

STOXX launched the very first decrement index back in 2014. Initially, we received criticism from some market players as well as questions and concerns from regulators, and even internally. It was not easy to get the point across, but we were convinced decrement was a good concept that would add value to investors because it improved the level of protection and performance of structured products. We stayed firm in our conviction and made the effort to explain the concept. Decrement indices are now seen as one of the most recent innovations in the structured products market and the market seems to have proven us right!”

*Price Waterhouse Cooper, March 2022: Gender pay gap and diversity in financial services – what’s changing? Updated year 4 Gender pay gap reporting 2020-21.

**https://www.reuters.com/business/sustainable-business/mostbanks-narrow-uk-gender-pay-gaps-ubs-deutsche-bank-go-intoreverse-2022-04-04/

Indexing For Change

Diana Van Maasdijk, CEO, and fellow philanthropy and women’s rights expert Jo Andrews launched workplace gender equality data provider Equileap to a chorus of scepticism back in 2016. What a difference six years makes… In June last year the company was chosen as one of seven data providers for Nasdaq’s new ESG Hub.

Equileap assesses more than 4,000 companies globally on criteria including gender balance, pay gap, parental leave and anti-sexual harassment policies. Its data is used for ESG integration, portfolio analysis, stewardship and managing reputational risks.

Among the indices based on Equileap’s data is the Eurozone Gender Diversity Select 50 index, which will surely be used as a structured products underlying. Diana says it has attracted a huge amount of attention from different parties in the industry following its joint launch with Euronext last month.

She says, “We’re in conversation with several asset managers who are actively looking into it. It's very early days, but relative to other launches of this nature, the signs all indicate that take-up will be strong.”

And does she think such indices can have a role in themselves in promoting gender equality in financial services? “Absolutely, yes,” she says. “The indices that define ‘best in class’ for gender equality are an incentive for companies in financial services and all other sectors.”

She says the indices, “encourage companies to raise their game, promote fairer working conditions, and better gender balance,” explaining, “Companies want the validation such an ESG index provides as well as the recognition they get from investors. Also, they know investors are recognising clear links between better gender equality and better financial performance/ lower volatility.