By Frank J. Diekmann
Call it the gender-non-ender. But for good reason.
As I noted a week ago when the issue was a point of focus at CUNA’s GAC, gender equality in credit unions is a semi-talked about issue. While the data show a large number of female CEOs, the practical reality is that those numbers are skewed by the preponderance of women holding CEO titles at small credit unions. The top 100 CUs remain mostly a guy thing when it comes to the corner office thing.
Outside of credit unions, new research on financial companies has found women are making gains in senior management, although it can be hard to discern at times just what the numbers mean—if you can get the numbers at all.
Researchers using data from forms companies of more than 100 employees must file with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission found that just four of 13 financial companies in the Standard & Poor’s 100 Index share their complete EEO-1 data with the public: Allstate, Bank of New York Mellon, Citigroup, and Bank of America.
Others, such as JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, and Goldman Sachs have revealed some of their EEO-1 data in annual reports, sharing broad percentage breakdowns of women and minorities among different employee groups. Others, like American Express, publish none of the data.
Still, an exec with Amex recently said that the percentage of female executives at the company rose to 39% from 37% between 2010 and 2014, and more than 60% of the company’s global workforce is female. How that breaks out wasn’t, well, broken out.
One other note on this subject before closing for now. In a previous column I had weighed in that it seemed ironic, at best, that the keynote address at the Global Women’s Leadership Network breakfast during GAC was delivered by a man, NCUA Vice Chair Rick Metsger.
But since the whole issue of gender equality is about fairness, a little fairness about that observation is in order. Metsger was invited to the breakfast because in 2014 he had asked NCUA staff for data on credit union leadership by gender. It’s also a subject he has written about in some NCUA publications.
That research looked at CEO gender in three peer groups: under $100 million, $100 million to $500 million, and over $500 million. When controlling for asset size, NCUA said it found that female-led CUs performed as well as or better than male-led CUs, both in CAMEL ratings and net worth. That’s the good news.
The bad news remains that NCUA found that the larger the CU, the less likely the CEO was to be female. Indeed, at the time it did its research NCUA found that just 34 of the 224 credit unions of more than $1 billion in assets have a female CEO (one of whom is featured this week in CUToday.info’s The Corner, which can be here).
So there is a glass ceiling in credit unions by assets (glasset ceiling)? It would seem so. Moving forward as more CUs merge to create larger operations it will be interesting to see how that data evolves.
What About the Disrupted?
Speaking of CUNA’s GAC… Credit unions love to bring in speakers who talk of “disruptive technologies,” as if it’s something new, even though CUs have been disrupting financial services themselves for more than a century. But what’s it like to be disrupted? As you can imagine, its not just uncomfortable, it can be downright frightening.
One such disruptive technology CU execs themselves are often a part of is Uber, the so-called “ride-sharing” service that is seriously disrupting the wallets of many cab drivers. For credit unions that make taxi medallion loans, this is also a significant “disruptor,” as the once rock-solid piece of collateral, a medallion, is finding itself in the same territory that Garmin stock once found itself.
CUs that make medallion loans have downplayed the effects of Uber and Lyft in interviews with CUToday.info. But taxi drivers themselves tell a different story, as CUToday.info reporter Ray Birch found when he interviewed several drivers while in DC for GAC. You can find what Ray discovered drivers are saying here. http://www.cutoday.info/THE-news/Cab-Drivers-Concerned-About-Future-And-Future-Value-Of-Taxi-Medallions
For Your Basketball Jones
* Two quick basketball notes for those of you jonesing for them. CUToday.info is currently running the first-ever CU-wide March Madness brackets competition. You can find out who’s leading here. And there was also this recent headline from YourErie.com: “Lebron Sentenced for Credit Union Robberies.” Not sure this should surprise anyone. LeBron is often a league leader in steals.
Frank J. Diekmann is Cooperator in Chief at CUToday.info and can be reached at Frank@CUToday.info.