Women ascend at Fidelity, Santander while gender gap persists

LONDON – At Fidelity Investments, like Banco Santander SA, decades of preparation and an heiress effect helped propel a woman to the top job for the first time.

Abigail Johnson, 52, is taking over from her father at closely held Fidelity in Boston, administrating retirement plans for millions of Americans. Last month, Ana Botin became the most powerful woman in European banking after succeeding her father as chairman of Spain’s Santander, which has holdings stretching from Brazil to Poland.

The number of women holding top roles in banking and asset management, though improving, still lags behind other industries. While women have more than half of all jobs in financial services, their ranks drop off between the mid-manager and executive levels and they account for only about 2 percent of chief executive officer positions globally, compared with 5 percent across all industries, according to research last year from PricewaterhouseCoopers.

“Having another prominent female role model is great, but we also need to work harder to attract and retain women at all levels in our organizations, not just at the top,” said Anne Richards, chief investment officer of Aberdeen Asset Management Plc. “We need to do more as an industry to attract women into our ranks.”

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While fund companies such as BlackRock Inc. and Pacific Investment Management Co. have women occupying important roles, Johnson’s position as leader of a money manager with more than $2 trillion in client funds is unprecedented.

Highest ranking

With a degree in art history and a net worth of $9 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, Johnson worked her way through almost every major division of Fidelity after joining as an intern and answering phones at the headquarters three decades ago. Her rise to the top of the company, founded by her grandfather in 1946, makes her the highest-ranking woman in the nearly $12 trillion mutual-fund industry.

BlackRock, which manages $4.3 trillion, has three women on its 23-member global executive committee led by CEO Laurence Fink. Pimco’s Virginie Maisonneuve is the only woman among six chief investment officers at the firm.

Botin, 54, formerly CEO of Santander’s U.K. unit, succeeded her father Emilio Botin after he died of a heart attack in Madrid on Sept. 9. The eldest of Botin’s six children, Ana has spent half her life working at Santander as her father built a global banking giant out of a regional lender based in a port city in northern Spain.

Most valuable

Botin oversees a bank with 1.2 trillion euros ($1.5 trillion) in assets — larger than the Spanish economy — and the biggest market value of any lender in the euro area. She started her career at JPMorgan in 1981 and is now extending the leadership role of her family, which owns about 2 percent of Santander and has helped run it since at least 1895.

The mother of three has also said she wanted women to have the same opportunities as men. At Banesto, a Santander unit she ran before taking charge of the U.K. business, she tried to avoid having the bank hold meetings after 7 p.m. to prevent disruption to families.

A Santander spokesman declined to comment.

There are no female CEOs at the six largest banks in the U.S., nor the three largest in Britain, Germany, France and Italy. The number of women executives on boards globally has doubled over the past 10 years to about 5 percent, according to Tom Kirchmaier, a fellow in the Financial Markets Group at the London School of Economics, who studies the role of women on boards.

Success stories

“The change is good but the levels are still terrible,” he said. “Society wastes a lot of excellent human capital.”

Botin and Johnson have more in common than their ascent to the top of family-led businesses. In the 1980s, both attended Harvard Business School, which has produced a sizable list of female corporate stars, including Mary Erdoes, the CEO of JPMorgan Chase & Co.’s asset-management division.

Botin said she plans to stick with the strategy her father developed over decades. Among Santander’s 14 board members, four are female.

At Fidelity, Johnson is the only woman on the board, though other women have senior roles. Nancy Prior leads the fixed- income investing business, which oversees $867 billion in assets, while Kathleen Murphy runs personal investing, overseeing $1.5 trillion in client assets.

Johnson wasn’t immediately available to comment.

“There’s little evidence that we have reached a turning point just yet,” said Jo Silvester, a professor of psychology at Cass Business School in London. “Continuing to profile each success story is important, but we need to reach the point when a woman in a top job is no longer news.”

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