The Social Pressure is On: Barclays vice chairman of investment banking Barbara Byrne recently rang the opening bell at the NYSE to launch the Women in Leadership Index, which is comprised of 85 companies that have female CEOs or boards that are at least 25% female. The idea is to create social pressure on companies to be more inclusive and supporting of women in the workplace and at the executive level, she said. Byrne, repeatedly one of American Banker's Most Powerful Women in Finance, said she'd also like to see more women in the government sector who have finance-related senior leadership positions. "Things are moving in the right direction, but it does at times seem to be slower. But every time you get a Janet Yellen or
Christine Lagarde, who's obviously performing brilliantly in her position, people see the professional. They don't see the woman. And that's the way it should be."
New Recruiting Rules: Lloyds Banking Group has banned all-male shortlists for assistant vice-president level candidates and higher, requiring at least a third of those listed to be women. "No shortlist of candidates will be progressed until this objective is received without exception," the bank said in an email to recruitment firm Resource Solutions. The new standard follows earlier promises from Lloyds to give 40% of its top 8,000 jobs to women by 2020. It intends to be at 31% by the end of this year, although one employment lawyer said this hardly addresses the gender imbalance in the industry. "If I flip this on its head, they are still saying that two-thirds of candidates can be men it's not even a 50/50 requirement," she said.
The Power of Porat: Wall Street vet and ex-Morgan Stanley exec Ruth Porat, who left to run Google as CFO, now has that same title at Alphabet, the newly created holding company for Google's many businesses. As CFO of Alphabet she'll oversee capital allocation for each business and compensation for each of their CEOs. Porat ranked third on American Banker's Most Powerful Women in Finance list last year.
Role Call
Wells Fargo has hired Allianz veteran Jasmine Jirele to head its trust operations team and oversee the roughly person retirement division. At Allianz she was senior vice president of enterprise operations for its North American life insurance group.
Cornerstone Bank in York, Neb., has tapped Kris Holoch to succeed her father Kelly Holthus as the bank's chief executive. Holoch previously served as executive vice president and on the board.
Wintrust Financial in Rosemont, Ill., has named Kathleen Boege general counsel. Boege will replace Lisa Pattis, who will leave next month to join Next Chapter Holdings as president. Next Chapter manages the investments of the Pattis family and the Pattis Family Foundation. Boege joins Wintrust from a railroad freight car manufacturing company.
Central Pacific Financial in Honolulu has appointed Anna Hu, currently a senior vice president and credit administration division manager, to step into the interim role of chief credit officer. She will take over the credit-related responsibilities of the departing chief risk officer, who just announced his resignation.
Broadway Financial in Los Angeles announced former MUFG Union Bank executive Erin Selleck has joined its board, serving on the audit, loan and compliance committees. Broadway expanded its board to seven directors to create a seat for her.
In Case You Missed It
Not the Same: Maybe Wall Street should embrace the differences between men and women instead of acting like they're completely the same. The suggestion comes from John LeFevre, the man behind the Twitter handle @GSElevator, an outrageous but reliably funny parody of Wall Street banking culture. In a post about why women don't get promoted on Wall Street, he asserts that the pressure on companies to hire and promote women is proving to be pointless and it's time to make substantive changes in company policy and corporate culture. To do that, embrace women's priorities outside the workplace, he says. "Supporting women who choose family and a healthy work/life balance is the only way to get more women into senior positions, and that's the only way to change the corporate culture." (LeFevre, who has tweeted anonymously for years, has never worked at Goldman Sachs; he was a former bond exec at Citigroup.)
Transparency in Social Finance: How can financial services companies help close the investment gap in developing countries? BNY Mellon's Karen Peetz, argues they need to make the current range of investment opportunities and their varying levels of social impact clearer for investors. There's $22 trillion in social finance investments today that is, "socially responsible investing" driven by social and environmental impact as well as financial returns according to BNY Mellon research. Peetz says that more investors would consider getting involved in social finance, if the industry could find a way to address the lack of products that meet investor risk and return requirements. Peetz ranked second on American Banker's 2014 list of the Most Powerful Women in Banking.
Beyond Banking
More Manbassadors: The men-for-women movement is growing. There's an increasing number of university campuses with male-dominated student populations running all-male gender equality clubs. Wharton just founded The 22s, named after the pay gap between men and women. Others include the Manbassadors at Harvard and WIMmen at Stanford."One of the key ideas behind the group was we wanted to dispel the notion that gender equality is a women's issue," said Simran Singh, who graduated from Wharton this year and now works as a senior product manager for VMware. "We wanted to show that it's a universal issue."
Meryl's Movie Mission: A script development program for female screenwriters over the age of 40, The Writers Lab, selected 12 participants for its first lab on Monday. The program, funded by Meryl Streep, received more than 3,500 submissions. The lab will take place in mid-September on Lake George at the Wiawaka Center, a women's retreat center that's been running since 1903. You can see the names of the writers and mentors here.
One more thing
Roller derby on ESPN. Really?
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