Back in 1993, Dorothy Savarese felt like the odd woman out.
She had just joined Cape Cod 5 as a part-time commercial lender, and she had a toddler at home. At the time, she didn’t see a lot of colleagues in a similar situation.
“I’d go to meetings and I was often the only woman in the room,” Savarese said. “There wasn’t yet that direct connectivity to understand that the best way an organization can achieve its mission is to encourage diversity, equity and inclusion.”
Nearly 30 years later, Savarese is still working on making that connection clear — and she’s made some serious progress. Today,
“The industry has begun to get that diverse viewpoints lead to better performance, and that you’re a better organization when you reflect what your customers look like and can understand them,” she said. “But we still have a really long way to go.”
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“At a time of rapid change, it’s critical to have divergent points of view in order to adapt and be nimble,” Savarese said. “It’s sort of like, how could you not invest in these things?”
Investing in (and developing) talent
Throughout 2020, nearly 3 million women exited the workforce in the United States, accounting for 55% of total job loss. As the nation moves towards recovery, it will take more than a standard set of benefits and perks to bring those women back to work.
“It’s no longer about, ‘Here’s a 401(k) and milk-ship,'” said Cate Luzio, CEO of Luminary, referring to the practice of companies paying for a female executive who is a new mother to ship her breast milk home during work trips. Luminary, which
“This is also not a conversation about flexibility and work-from-home,” Luzio added. "This is about elevating women and making them visible within the pipeline.”
The so-called pipeline problem has long been an excuse when employers are asked to defend their lack of diversity. In reality, it’s rarely a matter of available talent.
“We always say, men have the golf course and the skeet shooting, but women don’t always have the same kind of access to business networks,” says Mary Straton Smith of BankPlus, a $5 billion-asset bank in Ridgeland, Mississippi, that also has locations across Louisiana and Alabama.
Smith is the director of The Source, a networking organization launched by BankPlus in 2017 with the goal of connecting professional women — within the bank and beyond. Membership is free, industry-agnostic, and provides networking opportunities as well as access to talks, podcasts, educational tools and digital resources. More than 1,500 women have joined.
“A lot of the women didn’t know they needed The Source until it existed,” Smith said. “But once you have access to those networking and educational opportunities, you realize that it’s filling a space that was really missing.”
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Within BankPlus, just 18% of the leadership team is female — though perhaps not for long.
“We’ve really revolutionized our training department to create different career tracks and give women the tools to get them where they need to go,” said Alison Tyler, the chief human resources officer at BankPlus. She points to a recent female hire who, straight out of college, joined the credit administration department but quickly outgrew the entry-level responsibilities.
“Instead of holding her back, her manager referred her to our commercial real estate lending department, and even though she didn’t have a lot of background, she was transferred, trained, and is one of our top lenders there today,” Tyler said. “And she still has so much growth opportunity. When I see people like that succeed, it makes me feel successful. We want to see a lot more of that happen.”
Similar efforts are going on throughout the banking industry. At Cape Cod 5, Savarese long ago expanded strategic planning sessions to include more than just those with executive vice president and senior vice president titles. “That allowed us to include some less-tenured women who hadn’t made it all the way up there yet, and create some additional mentoring and growth paths,” she said. “Most of them have actually now become senior vice presidents, because we took a more inclusive approach.”
When it comes to external hiring, Cape Cod 5 also prioritizes identifying talent first, rather than obsessively searching for candidates with the perfect skillset. With new hires — whether recent graduates or mid-career talent switching to banking from another industry — rotations to different departments help the bank identify what type of role would be the best fit.
“Recruiting on the Cape is very difficult,” said Laura Newstead, Cape Cod 5’s chief human resources officer. “It’s not a large year-round population. So we look for people who possess resiliency and the ability to deal with ambiguity. We can build our own talent from there.”
In Hawaii, American Savings Bank celebrates high-performing female team members and supports their professional growth through multiple programs, including the ASB Leadership Academy. Now in its sixth year, the intensive yearlong program focuses on enhancing business acumen and leadership skills. About 57% of Leadership Academy alumni overall are women; the cohort participating this year is about 42% female.
Separately, the ASB Women’s Network meets quarterly to discuss ways to help foster career advancement.
The $8.9 billion asset bank, based in Honolulu, has an overall staff that’s 70% women, and a leadership team that’s nearly 50% women.
“For us, this is not a coincidence,” said Ann Teranishi, president and CEO of American Savings. “We are proud to have created a culture in which everyone — including women — is celebrated, supported and provided opportunities to advance and thrive.”
Supportive benefits, tough talk
Of course, the ability to thrive at work requires more than just professional support, and banks focused on employee retention have been enhancing benefits to help employees cope with personal disruptions caused by COVID-19.
In addition to providing 16 weeks of fully paid parental leave, American Savings added to its benefits during the pandemic with Child Care Match, a program in which the bank matched $2 for every $1 contributed to a dependent care flexible spending account. Cape Cod 5 covers up to $5,200 annually for child- or eldercare. At BankPlus, an employee-assistance program provides counseling, at no cost, to all employees and dependents, and annual mammograms are covered for all female employees starting at the age of 35.
For each of these banks, supporting its female workers (and a diverse workforce in general) is a nonstop project, one that’s always evolving. It requires the constant exploration of data, results and trends in the workplace, and demands that tough conversations be had.
When it comes to pay equity, for example, executives at American Savings meet annually to ensure that compensation is fair regardless of gender and demographics.
It’s worth noting that this type of discussion, increasingly, is happening among women — with or without the support of their employers. “In the past six months, I’ve heard more women vocalize where they’re at in their compensation than ever before, and that helps spotlight discrepancies,” Luzio said. “For all the time I spent in banking, when I was coming up on my year review, who did I call? My guy friends. They never shied away from talking about how much they were making in their bonuses. And women are finally having those conversations.”
True change for women, in banking and beyond, will require support from employers, friends and colleagues — including men. “I’d like to point out to the men in the room that women need allies, and we need men supporting us and amplifying our ideas,” BankPlus’ Smith said. “The Source, as a program, would not exist if we didn’t have the support that we do from the men in leadership roles here.”
Still, Smith said, women are their own best ally, especially when it comes to building systemic change and paving the way for a more equitable future.
“It’s not just about women in the finance industry, but all women in the workforce,” she said. “It’s kind of overwhelming to think about all the professional women that have come before us to pave the way. We’re trying to do right by them and, as we climb the ladder, make sure we’re reaching down to help out other professional women.”
