On fighting the boys club and building role models in financial services

What role do women play in financial services? If we go back three or four decades, the answer would be drastically different than it is today. In 2024, women are leaders, business owners, venture capitalists, entrepreneurs, bankers, board members, engineers, regulators … they are stakeholders and hold positions of power.

But they didn’t always. And some of the senior women leaders in the industry still remember how different attitudes used to be when Silicon Valley was experiencing its first days of glory. “Looking back on it, there were nuances to that workplace that we would consider a toxic culture now that I don’t think most corporations would ever allow in the workplace,” said Michelle Boston, Bank of America’s CIO of data management technology.

The need for a role model

The treatment gets worse as the degrees of “other” increase —Michelle Boston, a Latina who describes herself as “hooked on data” recounts how Hispanic and Latino communities haven’t had role models that look like them. Having these, would have helped solidify the possibility of success in the minds of young Hispanic and Latina women. 

“In many cases, the Hispanic and Latino community just don’t have the role models that are creating the emphasis that jobs in technology pay two times the national average. It creates this huge opportunity for economic mobility for generations to come, right? Because then your family has more economic mobility, you have more buying power, you’re more successful and you bring that back to your community. But how do you start the chain of events that creates an exponential shift into technology careers?” she said. 

Challenging what a leader looks like and the boys club 

It’s a cyclical problem and one whose effects are felt by other women leaders as well. For example, Suneera Madhani, CEO and co-founder of Worth AI and ex-CEO of Stax Payments, reports feeling like she is up against an archetype:

“When I started at 26, there already was a profile of what a successful entrepreneur physically looked like, and that I did not fit into. I was told no before I even had the chance to start – it’s still the boys club,” she said.

Madhani adds that she has walked into rooms where she has been expected to be anyone but the person in charge. “I’ve dealt with everything from not being taken seriously to me going into a room and people thinking I am just an assistant or marketing director vs the CEO. During a critical fundraising period while I was pregnant, I was asked a million and one questions about balancing my roles as CEO and mother—questions my male co-founder, who was also expecting a child, did not encounter,” said Madhani. 

Pressing on and continuing to build and lead companies is one way to challenge the boys club, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t personally taxing. “I’ve often felt the pressure to be overqualified and over-prepared just to earn a seat at the table. I knew that was the game, and while I never let it stop me, it’s exhausting to constantly have to prove myself,” she said. 

It would be a mistake to think that we have the problem of representation handled up until the c-suite. Unfortunately, feeling estranged and like the odd one out is a problem that starts very early, in the STEM classrooms where women feel like imposters.

So how do we make further progress? How do we make sure that our c-suites and our classrooms welcome women? In the absence of a wave that washes away all questions about whether a woman can make decisions and especially when she is carrying a child, we are left with a much less dramatic and much more work intensive set of options: individual leadership and mindful institutional commitment. 

Here’s what to do and how:

1. Invest into giving the STEM classroom a makeover: Girls Who Code is a non-profit that provides young women access to technical skills and mentors to increase the number of women in computer science. FIs like Bank of America have partnered with Girls Who Code to put together Industry Immersion Days where girls visit the bank’s premises, interact with its senior employees and are mentored by them.

   But what is most striking about this program is how it links talent acquisition with its community building efforts. The bank actively hires graduates from the Girls Who Code program and that is what ensures that the institution doesn’t just preach, but also practices.

2. Acknowledge that the C-suite needs work: “There’s only so many jobs at the top, and people stay there for a while. And those just don’t naturally turn over as fast. That’s where I think it’s hard to see progress. So as you’re doing succession planning, you just have to be intentional about being broad and thinking about the next generation. It’s harder to see the representation reflect our communities at the very, very top level, but it’s happening,” said Boston.

3. Build support for women-owned businesses: In the US, startups with only female founders raised 2% of the total capital invested in VC startups, according to the World Economic Forum. Banks have a role to play in changing this and one way to do this is to make the VC itself more diverse. “In 2020, we launched a program to invest in diverse, emerging VC fund managers who would go on to invest in women and diverse entrepreneurs,” said Tram Nguyen, Global Head of Strategic and Sustainable Investments at Bank of America.

1. Represent: One issue brought up by all the women leaders I have interviewed is that women just don’t fight for what they should get: “Don’t just do the work, represent the value of the work. Don’t be afraid to share the value of the work you delivered,” said Boston.

   Similarly, Luvleen Sidhu, CEO of BMTX said she has noticed a clear difference in how her employees approach conversations about salaries, depending on their gender:  “I have a lot more pay-related conversations with men, who actively bring it up. In contrast, I can count on one hand how many women have ever brought it up to me. I want to change that narrative: you should be bringing it up. Are you afraid to bring it up? Because the men are definitely bringing it up,” she said.

This courage to speak and stand up for the work you’ve done, can come from community as well: “It is so important to put yourself in the right rooms. You have to surround yourself with women who have the same goals as you and those who’ve been in the same spot as you. As women, our strongest power is our peer network – specifically a network that doesn’t gate keep,” said Madhani. 

The goal here isn’t to become men, while many of us feel like that’s what we would have to do to be taken seriously. “For years I always felt like I had to be ‘a man in a skirt’. I was trying to fit into the role that I believed I needed to be, to feel accepted. But I learned that women don’t need to play into the masculine energy that the world wants us to be in – especially in the business world.” said Madhani. 

“Where my growth actually happened was when I stopped trying to be something I wasn’t and listened to my gut.”

Sidebar: The lack of differently abled people in the c-suite

Sidebar is a member-exclusive section where we explore stories that are tangential to the main story above. In this Sidebar, I dive into what organizations can do to make c-suites more representative for differently abled people, if you want to keep reading please consider becoming a Tearsheet Pro subscriber by clicking below.