Market themselves to female graduates

It’s arguable that not enough is being done to encourage women into STEM and then attract female STEM graduates into quant roles while they’re in education. But there are options open to forward-thinking financial institutions. By sponsoring scholarships, bursaries, job fairs and ancillary programmes; financial firms can identify and woo top talent from within the school system. Making those early connections can ensure a consistent pipeline of fresh talent too.

Develop professionals from other fields

For the many women who are already part of the professional workforce, they may not be aware of the transferable skills that would allow them to achieve in the world of quantitative finance. By creating a programme to generate awareness, identify, coach and cross-train professionals working in related sectors; companies can increase the pool of candidates. This could take the form of online courses, events, conferences, webinars or micro-internships.

Promote women into leadership roles

It’s not enough to attract more candidates. They need to enjoy the culture once they’re placed. By ensuring female representation within company leadership, you’re providing a voice and advocacy for issues that concern women in quant. You’re also showing that there is an opportunity for growth to the highest levels within your firm too. Diversity within your leadership team will also help promote an inclusive culture where everyone feels they belong.

If you’re looking to attract more women into your quant roles, let’s talk about how we can help. We’re experts at making the right connections between sought-after professionals and our clients in specialist sectors including, Quantitative Finance, Technology & Risk.

The post Advancing Women in Quant? How can we make the change? appeared first on Scale Search.

This also needs to be considered alongside having to think about what the company itself needs to be focused on to help achieve business success apart from its people. Without the right leadership which sets out a powerful strategy for the future, helps to mobilise employees and is equipped to make the tough decisions, companies basically stumble and fail.

In an article in the McKinsey quarterly “Do You Have the Right Leaders for Your Growth Strategies” there has be shown to exist a definite relationship between individual leadership skills and returns and business growth. Making comparisons between a database on the growth performance of over 700 companies, and analysis of performance appraisals of more than 100,000 senior executives the research found that when the teams members at the top all had strong leadership scores, then income was at its highest for businesses which might be as expected. However, they found that there was no correlation in leadership teams with solid but unexceptional employees. So, it is evident that business success comes from outstanding leaders, but the question remains how do you find these leaders.

Most interesting, the research found that individual leadership skills favour different business strategies. It seems not all leaders are the same. Only 1% of the executives that they looked into achieved a competency score which would mean they had all of the required competencies to lead for growth. This really supports the idea that few executives leading an organisation can do everything by themselves. It takes a combination of leader’s skills and talents to comprehensively engage in high quality business growth strategies. Companies need to be using this insight when it comes to creating a leadership team that is effective. Since only a few executives had the high scores in all competencies, attempting to start-up growth by considering using only this type of leader only their own is a danger, and also, they are fairly elusive to find. An alternate tactic may be for companies to nurture particular competencies that are correlated with generating growth in their current leadership teams or appoint new team members to help to bridge the gaps in existing leadership teams.

Core customer needs

To improve performance in general, the analysis shows that one of the most impactful competencies that leaders need, that delivers the biggest gains, is the capacity to identify with customers evolving needs. The 2017 PWC Global Operations Survey, found that 63% of business leaders find it challenging to recognize their customers’ priorities, and have said that 61% find it difficult to change direction quickly enough to respond to customers’ wants. McKinsey correspondingly found that if around 40% of senior teams are highly competent at customer impact, then this drives superior business growth. So, this suggests that not all of a leadership team need this skill but when a significant number do have it, then this can impact your growth strategy in a powerful way.

Diversity in strategy

To accomplish strong growth, companies should not just gather a number of excellent leaders, but they must additionally align these leaders’ positions with a combination of different growth strategies. The most successful companies must conduct comprehensive assessments of the abilities required to encourage growth across the business. Then clear-cut leadership-development targets need to be set for different types of leaders which can then be incorporated into performance-management in a holistic way.

Diversity & Inclusion

Companies with well-versed portfolio growth strategies have been found to be 46% more likely to endure in business in the next five years in comparison to those who do not operate a portfolio of diverse growth strategies according to long term study of hundreds of worldwide companies from by Capron and Mitchell. However, they found 40% of those businesses relied mainly on a single growth strategy which does not reflect the need for a diverse leadership style. Diversity in strategy enables companies to systematically create outstanding leadership with the spectrum of skills necessary to drive growth.

Internal development of staff leadership teams in combination with the right growth strategies will ultimately be the best thing for business growth. The main consideration is understanding that different leaders will have different competencies. So, ensuring that existing knowledge about employees is up to date and continually tested, and setting up an organisational structure that works for everyone should lead to further growth. Importantly, even when a business has the pertinent technical expertise or high-quality products and services business growth ultimately is reliant on the right leadership.

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The route to the C-suite is not an easy journey for anyone, it takes dedication and endeavor. It can be a path littered with challenges and pitfalls for most people and only the most dedicated employees get there, but for some, there are additional barriers that get in the way. As most of us know, this is particularly true for women, the LGBT community, ethnic minorities, and people with disabilities. The recruitment industry still wrestles with getting diversity and inclusion right. The issue is that it is frequently failing to appeal to diverse talent thanks to inclusivity concerns in the workplace. Many organizations are wising up however and are looking to up their diversity game with the changes being both tough but also financially rewarding.

Issues of discrimination

Demonstrating the magnitude of the fight facing a large number of the workforce is a host of research that shows a lack of representation at higher levels. Research characterizes many senior management teams across the industry as wholly lacking in diversity in the C-suite. Diversity in leadership is a subject that has most certainly been a real conversation starter, especially since the #MeToo movement has pushed the issue to the forefront. Discrimination of women is not something that can be thought of as work-based culture anymore.

Now as a priority, the UK’s top firms are on track to achieve the target of over a third boardroom positions being held by women in 2020. Although it has been said in a recent government-backed review that there is a systematic lack of support for women to make headway into the C-suite and other leadership roles. The report found that of the 923 senior positions in organizations held by women, only 25 women had been selected as a chief executive. Clearly breaking down barriers in the C-suite still has a long way to go and diversity needs to be promoted.

There is good reason to value diversity in the top roles of organizations. A 2018 Mckinsey report ‘Women Matter, Time to accelerate’ suggests that diverse staffing and leadership at the top can improve a business’s operating results by as much as 55% and boost the return on equity by 35%. Diversity equals higher financial returns for businesses, and it increases the net knowledge of service users. McKinsey unearthed a statistically significant correlation between improved financial performance and diverse leadership. Businesses with the most ethnic diversity at higher levels are 33% more prone to have better profitability than firms that do not.

How to break down the barriers

There are a number of ways that people can be supported to chart a course to the C-Suite which is a key target for leaders of successful businesses. Sponsors within the organisation can be influential in facilitating advocacy for those that are facing discrimination and help to advance careers. Mentors are another method that can be offered by organisations to provide advice and guidance to individuals to help to develop a career. Mentorship is valuable but sponsorship for those that face discrimination by people in power is vital. Mentors can offer direction to employees about routes to professional development whereas sponsorship can be useful in advocating a person for important openings and offer direct access to critical social networks that open up more opportunities.

Peer networks can easily be set up and encouraged so peers can become a valuable source of support to cope with impending fears about discrimination. They allow people to get advice on how to handle it. Broadening what you know can be an important shift from being an experienced expert to being seen as a real leader. With the help of the advice and experience of others who have been in the same position, this is a fundamental way to break down barriers.

As a result of recent conversations around diversity and inclusion, many organisations are adopting to even take a new approach in recruitment. This is one of creating new and evolving roles that are designed to specifically concentrate on ensuring equality throughout the organisation on all levels. The formation of C-suite positions concentrating completely on workplace diversity and inclusion offers new opportunities and highlights how inclusion needs to be a business priority when considering financial returns and the morale of staff. Recruiting tactics must be guaranteeing that new employees are incorporated into a positive working culture and that they have had a role in creating this culture, meaning that they will be more likely to want to stay.

As more women and other diverse groups join the C-suite, it is a growing belief that this will lead to a downscaling of traditional ideas and practices that have spread through the recruitment industry itself and hopefully breakdown the barriers further. However, breaking down barriers and increasing the viability of diversity and inclusion in the C-suite is an ongoing process.

To discuss your D&I strategy for the C-Suite, talk to the Scale Search team of experts.

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We’re just letting you know that all the 4 SGI brands are operational at every location. (Source Technology, Xplore Life Science, Scale Search & Picture Global)

We’ve always been set up for remote work, meaning we can work with you, and you will experience no disruption or interference.

We’d like to emphasize that SGI are here for you, do not hesitate to reach out to the team, it’s a vital time to talk.

We wish you well and hope that your families, teams, and companies remain healthy, and if you need any help over these difficult times, we are here for you.

Thanks,

Lawrence Hargreaves & Gavin Tew

Co- Founders

Contact us

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I am unsure what prompted me to look up the definition of this term, perhaps its ubiquitous usage levelled by (often) female columnists in the popular press at some women who dared form part of the collective that became #metoo. Or, that at some level I registered the same word is rarely used in the same sentence as men. Maybe it was the number of column inches allocated to voices,  suggesting strongly that women have reached parity with men are laundering their own unrelated grievances under slurs of sexual harassment safe in the knowledge that the well, hysterical, atmosphere fomented by #metoo, a ‘win’ is all but assured.For a nation for whom the concept of fair play is among its proudest exports, odd we find ourselves in an era where the inconceivable becomes the lived reality: world leaders happily forgiven by electorates looking the other way for behaviours that could charitably refer to as unstatesmanlike; one kilometre from where the first woman ever was voted into parliament, The President Clubs charity ball,  an undercover FT reporter’s findings were enough to make your average male adolescent blush. In this context,  we may do well ask has equality come far enough?

Too far it would seem….

In mediapolis  we understand that backlashes are inevitable. That it would be given voice from the academic, legal and journalist profession who would happily chime that the discussions on women’s rights are redundant and the real enemies are University Arts and Corporate HR departments. More troubling is the dismissal that conclusions from D&I data as academically flawed, and simply an extension of cultural Marxism infecting all determined to undermine traditional society.  Further, one among their number claimed ‘studies show’ a woman’s natural habitat is where she can nurture and therefore is best suited to the home or caring professions. And any claim to be excluded from male-dominated structures are considered as little more than the dialled up axe-grinding of feminist fairytales. As proof one academic laboured long to prove that countries with a long history of equality eg Sweden,  women will revert to nursing or other caring professions rather than traditional male roles. The man explained, women actively choose lower-paid, higher risk jobs despite having access to higher-paying alternatives, you see. Never mind that an Italian female entrepreneur is likely to receive less favourable lending rates than her male counterpart even though females enjoy a lesser default rate than their male counterparts; that board appointments in the UK are at 37%;  that sexual harassment in the UK workplace is cited by half the female workforce. A stat too put down many as women have lost their sense of humour.

As we look to a post-Brexit era, where women rights hard-won, are by no means to be, perhaps time is owing to look in the mirror and remind ourselves what is good for individuals is ultimately good for all of society.

The etymology of hysteria reveals a peculiarly male view of women made all the more disturbing by its one-time cure.  Whatever shape women’s right take the post, Brexit, perhaps an era of more nuanced use of language is due.

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