Celebrating Women Leaders in Finance

07 March 2022

Females who are blazing the trail and changing the game.

This International Women’s Day we honour women in financial services. As a traditionally male-dominated industry, finance has not been the easiest occupation for females. They have had to fight conscious bias and unconscious beliefs about gender roles throughout their careers. The theme for the 2022 International Women’s Day is #BreakTheBias and it seems fit that today we acknowledge women in finance who do this every day.

It is time to take women seriously as a force to reckon with when it comes to money matters. Financial services have been predominantly male dominated, but women have come far. Today, women make up 43% of the UK finance industry’s workforce. It might look like we are well on our way to gender parity. However, when it comes to the C-suite, women make up just one-third of all board positions in the UK’s FTSE 100 companies.

Talking about women leaders in finance, if a picture says a thousand words, then the following picture makes quite a statement. This picture was taken at a high-profile finance seminar, the event was well-attended – however, from this picture you can see there was only one woman in the room – it was Sehar Zaman, the Managing Director at Abundance Network.

(Photo: Sehar Zaman, Managing Director Abundance Finance, the only woman in the room at a high profile Finance Seminar).

Women are an indispensable element of every society that wants to progress. Uplifting the female community is key to the growth of every aspect of society. Women are crucial to the success of financial institutions all over the world, and it is a global imperative for all who care about fairness and diversity to be more inclusive of women in the workforce.

The UK Treasury had launched a Women in Finance Charter in 2016, which aimed to improve gender diversity in the finance sector. As of March 2021, 70% of the signatories, including the Financial Ministry have met their targets and 60% of the signatories have at least 33% of female representation in senior management.

There is a long way to go despite the commitment from companies in the financial sector to address the gender imbalance. A survey by the MFAA indicated that unconscious bias and an industry culture that is not inclusive of women are the biggest barriers to women in mortgage broking. It is crucial to recognise these key factors that discourage women from joining financial services.

At Abundance, we are champions of diversity. We recognise that women have a natural predisposition to problem-solving and strategic thinking. They are empathetic and creative multitaskers who bring these personal elements to the broking process and uplift it.

Bringing women into the labour force is in everyone’s best interests. An IMF study confirms that more women in senior managerial positions and in corporate boardrooms are associated with stronger firm financial performance. If you want productivity and growth of societies and economies, you must provide better opportunities to women.

As may be evident from the picture earlier, our Managing Director, Sehar Zaman (who is also the Director of Your Keys and Protection, a successful Mortgage Brokerage) has had quite a journey herself. Sehar believes in creating an industry culture that welcomes women and challenges the bias against women in finance. At Abundance, we offer the peer support that is necessary to retain women in the workforce. Being led by a woman, we understand the challenges faced at home by working mothers and single working mothers.

A woman’s career cannot be ignorant of the role she plays at home. At Abundance, we accept that and support our women to be the mothers they want to be while ensuring their careers don’t suffer because of that. We are constantly finding ways to shift cultural expectations and introduce flexible working schedules.

Elif Yildiz is a Mortgage Advisor at Your Keys and Protection. She is an inspiring single mother and this is what she has to say about her journey and the difficulties she faced as a female broker: “It is a competitive market and I needed to work perhaps twice as hard to get here compared to my male peers. For women wanting to make it in finance, resilience and confidence are your best friends.’

(Photo: Elif Yildiz)

Elif further comments: ‘I’m excited that there are more opportunities for women today and companies, such as Your Keys & Protection, are more empathetic of working mothers than they were when I first started out. I would encourage the new generation of women in finance to seek out firms committed to bringing diversity.”

We are delighted to have partnered with women like Elif and look forward to helping more female brokers join us, become successful and #BreakTheBias. Diversity and inclusion are our most important values that drive our ability to offer a valuable mortgage network experience.

This International Women’s Day we pledge to #BreakTheBias against women in our line of work so we can ensure our daughters and granddaughters have even better opportunities available to them. We promise to help the women who work for us and with us to develop their full potential because women's empowerment helps everyone grow.