The success that Can-ada’s banks have had in promoting women to the highest management positions is a reflection of historical and societal forces that have forced them to do so, as well as an internal recognition that moving toward gender equity in the boardroom and in corner offices is in the banks’ long-term best interests.

“It’s not the bank that has transformed women; it’s women who have transformed the bank,” says April Taggart, senior executive vice president, talent management and diversity, in human resources for Bank of Montreal in Toronto.

Women at Canada’s largest credit unions have made even more significant strides in breaking into the top ranks. At Vancouver City Savings Credit Union and Coast Capital Savings Credit Union, both based in Vancouver, women account for significantly more than half of all senior management positions.

“Diversity issues are in our blood because of our community service mandate,” says Patrice Pratt, chairwoman of Vancity, the largest co-operative financial institution in Canada outside of Quebec. “Women work with us for a lifetime. There are women who started out with us at the branch level who now have senior roles.”

There is no question that banking, as a profession, has attracted women, as roughly two-thirds of all bank employees in Canada are female. This is a trend that took off during the Second World War and has continued to this day. Part of the profession’s appeal is that the banks offer training, flexible hours, stability and a chance to serve the public and the larger community, among other positive attributes.

However, for most of the banks’ history, senior management positions were largely the province of men. That started to change about two decades ago, when women began breaking through to top management positions. Today, about 25% or more of senior management positions are held by women, rising from the low single digits 20 years ago. Observers and industry insiders believe that the proportion of women in senior roles will continue to rise.

“The growth in representation is inevitable,” says Nancy Hughes Anthony, president and CEO of the Toronto-based Canadian Bankers Association. “Obviously, more and more women are going to rise to the top.”

The Employment Equity Act, brought in by the federal government in the mid-1980s, gave gender equity a spark. As a federally regulated industry, banks fall under the scope of the act, which ensures equal opportunities for employment to aboriginal peoples, persons with disabilities, members of visible minorities and women.

In addition, the banks are reacting to societal changes, including the fact that women represent the majority of university undergraduates and that more women are graduating with degrees in business administration and economics, Hughes Anthony says.

In recent years, all the banks have developed full diversity programs that pay much more than just lip service to goals of employment equity. The banks are driven by a need to reflect society better and to tap into a wider pool of talent.

“I would consider the banks the leaders for thinking through diversity issues,” says Alison Konrad, a professor of organizational behaviour at the Richard Ivey School of Business at the University of Western Ontario in London, Ont. “They are not only offering programs, but implementing them in such a way that managers and employees can use them.”

Konrad, who is also the Corus Entertainment Chair in Women in Management at Ivey, says banks follow up on their diversity initiatives so that managers keep them “top of mind and salient.”

In devising and implementing these diversity strategies, the banks are responding to a perceived expectation among Canadians that the banks will take a leadership role when it comes to diversity and equitable hiring, Konrad says: “It’s a sense of: ‘They have all our money; they better be looking to keep our goodwill’.”

Konrad also suggests that it’s clear how much diversity issues have become a priority for the banks as they all are now trumpeting their diversity bona fides in annual reports and marketing materials. “They are all competing with each other,” she says. {They all want to be No. 1 [in terms of diversity.]”

The banks’ tradition of promoting from within, their strong training and mentoring programs, and their benefits and work/life balance programs are the reasons that women have long flocked to banking and continue to do so, Hughes Anthony says. She adds that the banks are eager to find the best talent available and that ignoring any group is just no longer a feasible option for any corporation, let alone the country’s largest financial services institutions. “There’s a war for talent out there, and the banks are competing intensely,” Hughes Anthony says. “We want the highest-quality people we can get.”

@page_break@Canada’s credit unions got an early jump on the banks in diversity and gender equity issues simply because they were already looking beyond conventional groups, not only in terms of target customers but in hiring as well.

“There are differences between a traditional organization that needs to make changes [in terms of diversity] and a non-traditional organization that started out with diversity as a core value,” Konrad says.

At Vancity, 60% of senior managers are women, including CEO Tamara Vrooman, the credit union’s first female head. Of its current members of the board of directors, 64% are women, including Pratt.

“The very nature of a co-operative,” says Pratt, “which suggests men and women working together, changes how you approach hiring and promotion.”

All observers say that the promotion of women to the highest ranks has benefited banks and credit unions by giving board members and senior managers a greater array of perspectives and by better reflecting the employee workforce, the client base and society.

“It’s more predictive,” says France Pelletier, manager of employment equity and diversity for National Bank of Canada in Montreal. She says greater gender equity, as well as more diversity, in senior management and at the board level allows for greater strength in devising strategy, as opposed to the alternative of relying on the traditional old boys’ network, which can give a firm a blinkered view.

A study entitled Critical Mass on Corporate Boards: Why three or more women enhance governance, released in November 2006 by the Massachusetts-based Wellesley Centers for Women and co-authored by Konrad, suggests that boards of directors benefit from having three or more women as members: “It brings a collaborative leadership style that benefits board dynamics, helps raise important and sometimes controversial issues, brings new perspectives and issues to the table and raises tough questions.”

The study was conducted by interviewing women directors, CEOs and corporate secretaries from Fortune 1000 companies in the U.S. It found that while one or two female members sometimes could be dismissed by the rest of the board as representing “a woman’s point of view,” three or more women could not.

“When there are three women present, they start being treated as individuals with different personalities, styles and interests,” the study states. “Women’s tendencies tend to be more collaborative but also more active in asking questions, and raising different issues starts to become the boardroom norm.”

Pratt agrees that women bring a positive benefit to a board of directors. “We do things differently,” she says. “Maybe it’s something we get when we’re first wrapped in a pink blanket as babies, but we’re interested in being empathetic. When you do that, people feel valued.”

The changes that have allowed for the advancement of women are now benefiting men, as well. “We have large numbers of men who are now accessing the same policies that used to make women want to work here,” Taggart says. “Men are taking adoption leave, parental leave. Men are [taking advantage of] those things that made women want to work here.” IE