Name: The Girl Who Took on Wall Street--and The Company Behind Her
Uploaded: 2017-05-23
Duration: 3 min 6 s

[ MUSIC ] Wall Street, it's traditionally a world of men in ties. But then, a couple of months ago, a little girl popped up in bullion green. She was a marketing stunt by state street financial. Certainly there's a marketing element to the fearless girl, but ultimately we placed her there to represent our position [ MUSIC ] To corporate boards that gender diversity matters. That's a bit ironic, because at State Street, a financial holding company, only about one in five top executives are women. State Street's made a real effort to bring gender parity to its top management. We weren't quite sure how we would. Advanced females in the organization, because we weren't quite sure what was broken, or if anything was broken. So we thought the best thing that we could do was to influence the process through finding the high potential women. In 2010, a group of female executive vice presidents at the bank, established a mentoring program. We had a global mentoring program, which is like a match. com The goal, increase women in leadership positions by almost ten percent. And the mentee is almost required to come with a specific agenda. It needs to be thought of as a business relationship with real achievable outcomes. But that's not the only change State Street made in 2010. CEO Joseph [ UNKNOWN ] implemented multiple programs aimed at boosting women in leadership. He started by setting numeric targets for women in leadership and people of color. And then tied executive compensation to partly meeting those metrics. He also implemented unconscious bias training and encouraged flexible work Arrangements. This has led to improvements, but not enough. We don't have really a retention issues with women. We have women that are staying actually at a greater rate than men. But they're just not moving up through the company ranks as quickly as we would like to see. Imagine State Street's 35, 000 employees as a pyramid. At the bottom there are roughly 17, 000 associates, 53 % of these are women. By the time you reach at the top of the pyramid, only about 27 % of the positions are filled by women. A lot of the women assumed that if they just put their hands down and worked really hard, that somebody would notice. And they didn't understand why the guys might be getting ahead faster. When I see women not using their voice, not taking the seed off the table That has very long term ramifications to their mobility and their career advancement. Since putting these programs in place in 2010, the company has seen a 2 % jump in women associates, and an almost 6 % jump in females filling SVP and EVP roles. Their goal is to reach 28 % by the end of the year. Corporations needs boards that are effective, independent and strong. And an element of being effective and strong is ensuring that there's diversity at the board level. And that's the link between us as a [ UNKNOWN ] a fearless girl. [ BLANK_AUDIO ]