All over the developing world, women have successfully made it in business. But they are a small group of women — only 30 percent of formal small and medium enterprises (SMEs) around the world are owned and run by women. Seventy percent of formal women-owned SMEs in developing countries are either shut out of financial institutions or can’t get the capital they need.

This results in a nearly $300 billion annual credit deficit for formal women-owned SMEs. It is nearly impossible to sustain a business without access to capital. Lack of networks, knowledge, and links to high value markets further limit female entrepreneurship in developing countries.

We-Fi intends to change those statistics. Its holistic approach will help women in developing countries gain increased access to the finance, markets, and networks necessary to start and grow a business.
World Bank Statement on Women Entrepreneurs Finance Initiative We-Fi

Liza Donnelly

Notes to Worldbank Editors

• The facility will be established as a Financial Intermediary Fund (FIF) at the Bank, drawing on the Bank’s extensive experience housing such Funds.
• The Bank and IFC will be Implementing Partners, as well as other Multilateral Development Banks that would propose private and public sector activities to be supported by the We-Fi facility.
• While she helped initiate the idea for the facility and has been a strong advocate for the issue of women’s entrepreneurship, Advisor to the President Ivanka Trump will play no operational or fundraising role in the facility.

Women Are Finding Slow But Steady Progress in Finance. Female executives are seeing more positive shifts in their quest for full equality.

Jeff Bounds reports: After coming to Dallas early in her banking career, Carla Brooks got a surprise at a private club atop a downtown skyscraper, where a man had invited her for a business lunch. “We had to go to a separate dining room where women were allowed,” the Midwest native says of that late 1970s episode. “The main dining room was part of the men’s section.” Things have changed for women executives like Brooks, who today manages private equity funds’ investments in banks for Dallas-based Commerce Street Investment Management.

Where finding women in the boss’ office was once scarce, Elaine Agather, who helms both the 12,000-employee North Texas operation for JPMorgan Chase and the 200-employee southern region of its private bank, says she not only has a female boss, but sees women running the company’s consumer bank and credit card business.

“It’s not been directed from above,” Agather says about women’s high-level roles at Chase. “It’s because we have received opportunities and the support to be successful here.”
Despite decades of diversity efforts, management and executive roles in banking and finance remain male-dominated, an issue that crosses industries and job duties. In 2015, women made up 2.8 percent of CEOs in 60 finance and insurance companies in the S&P 500, according to Catalyst, a New York-based research and advocacy nonprofit….Women are finding progress in Finance

– but there are a lot less of them.

New data shows that the median pay for female CEOs was $1.5 million more than their male counterparts.

Women CEOs earned big bucks last year, but there’s still very few of them running the world’s largest companies.

The median pay for a female CEO was $13.1 million last year, up 9 percent from 2015, according to an analysis by executive data firm Equilar and The Associated Press. By comparison, male CEOs earned $11.4 million, also up 9 percent.

But the number of women in CEO roles has barely budged. Just 6 percent of the top paid CEOs in the U.S. last year were women, according to the Equilar and AP analysis, a slight increase from about 5 percent in 2015 and 2014.

The highest paid woman was Virginia Rometty of International Business Machines Corp., bumping out Yahoo’s Marissa Mayer from the top spot. Rometty earned $32.3 million last year from the technology company, a 63 percent jump from the year before, mainly due to $12.1 million in stock option awards she didn’t receive in 2015. Highest-paid female CEO? IBM’s Rometty tops Yahoo’s Mayer
Women and Paid Work

Growing up, I didn’t understand what a stock or a bond was, or how much my parents made, or if we were rich or poor.

Judith Ohikuare and Stacy Francis report: The financial world was very scary to me, and I never pictured myself working in it. Money was not something that my family deemed appropriate to talk about in public — and we didn’t talk about it at home either. Growing up, I didn’t understand what a stock or a bond was, or how much my parents made, or if we were rich or poor. My parents were definitely middle-class, and even though things weren’t always easy for them, they managed to give my brother and me anything that was important to us.

As a teenager, I got a job at a Dairy Queen and started to chip in for my own clothes, which is when I began to learn that things cost a lot of money — and that I’d need to go to college and do something other than work at Dairy Queen if I wanted to have what I considered an abundant life…..A Depressing Reason Women Should Care About Money

Rudolf Schuppler
www.w-t-w.org/en/cartoon/rudolf-schuppler

A new working paper finds that male financial advisers are considerably more likely to recover after they commit misconduct.

Whet Moser reports: When it comes to sexism in powerful and competitive industries like tech and finance, research tends to start with representation: how many women are employed at different levels of the companies? How many are on corporate boards?

If the number’s not representative of the general population, though, the problem can be difficult to diagnose. Is the problem in the industry itself? Does it go back farther into the talent pipeline, to graduate school, undergraduate, or even K-12, where young women or girls are gradually dissuaded from picking up the skills they need?

A new working paper, When Harry Fired Sally- The Double Standard in Punishing Misconduct from three professors of finance including the University of Chicago’s Gregor Matvos, takes a clever approach to measuring the presence of gender discrimination in finance: what happens to financial advisers after they commit misconduct? The pipeline question is eliminated; the group under examination is already in the industry…

Why would men be more likely to receive second chances, even though they’re statistically more risky as a gender and not significantly more productive? The authors don’t speculate on mechanisms, but finance professor Lily Fang spent five years looking into gender issues in the stock-research field, and found that, perhaps unsurprisingly, “the networking and personal connections that male analysts rely on so heavily to get ahead are much less useful for women in similar jobs.” It’s who you know: and, possibly, it’s not just about getting ahead, but also not falling off the map. Are Women Punished Harder By the Financial Industry

The best and worst places to be a working woman

MARCH 8th is International Women’s Day, a date designated by the UN to celebrate and advocate for women’s rights. To provide a benchmark for progress on gender equality in the labour market, The Economist has published its fifth annual “glass-ceiling index”. It combines data on higher education, workforce participation, pay, child-care costs, maternity and paternity rights, business-school applications and representation in senior jobs into a single measure of where women have the best—and worst—chances of equal treatment in the workplace. Each country’s score is a weighted average of its performance on ten indicators. …The Economist

The Economist’s glass-ceiling index measures gender equality in the labour market.

Harm Bengen
www.w-t-w.org/en/harm-bengen
www.harmbengen.de