Ilinca Rosetti is general manager of ProCredit Bank. While in other sectors there are women CEOs who run businesses of millions of euros, such as Monica Iavorschi (Arctic), and even worth billions of euros, like Mariana Gheorghe (Petrom), more often than not women in the banking system do not manage to climb the ladder beyond the vicepresident position.
“Women have more men as competitors, who have excellent professional skills and a high resistance to the current conditions. Intensive networking, 10-14-hour professional activity at least 3-4 days a week are just a few of the tough selection criteria for such a job,” says Mihaela Damian, country manager of executive search firm SpenglerFox, part of Irish group Grafton.
But the situation is similar at international level – Deutsche Bank, the world’s largest bank by assets, doesn’t even have women in its management board. The same is true of international groups Raiffeisen and Erste Group. However, the board of Societe Generale has seven men and three women, while the board of UniCredit has 18 men and three women.
Recently, a professional association of women in top management positions in business has been set up, PWN Romania.
“The number of women in the boards of Romanian banks is important. It is very true that the presence of men in such positions in banks is overwhelmingly more extensive, but, although our association does not have statistics, we estimate that in general the situation in Romania regarding the access of women to top positions falls within the trend of developed countries in Europe,” says Carmen David, VP International Networks Cooperation, and founding member of PWN Romania.
The association has as members women who used to or still hold top management positions in banks and financial institutions, such as Manuela Plapcianu – former CEO of Bancpost, Antoaneta Curteanu – CEO of UniCredit Leasing and Virginia Otel, VP of Garanti Leasing.
“Women remain excellently positioned in the area of motivation and performance of bank network and risk management teams, there are many examples of women vice-presidents in banks,” Mihaela Damian adds.
But specialists say in the US there are specialized divisions of major players on the consultancy market which provide assistance to clients in order to ensure gender diversity.
“In the US, if a company is accused in a court of law of discriminatory policies, one of the first actions of the prosecutor is to check statistical diversity: men vs. women, distribution of various age groups, racial distribution etc. If you can’t prove you are making significant efforts to comply with diversity principles, you run the risk of the jury finding it an aggravating factor,” Fedorovici also says.
(English version by Daniela Stoican)