Women in Finance
OVERVIEW OF BANK TELLERS AS AN ENTRY LEVEL POSITION
For many years, women have ‘gotten a foot in the door’ to the finance industry by becoming bank tellers. By the early 2020s, that path was disappearing. The number of tellers – a job in which four out of five positions are held by women – has dropped more than 20% in the U.S. and Canada in the last decade as transactions move from branches to mobile phones, accelerated by less personal customer appearances at banks due to the covid pandemic.
Technological advances are eliminating the need for as many bank tellers, threatening an entry point for women into the male-dominated industry that has sought to promote more females to leadership roles.
Modern tellers have duties beyond cashing checks and completing deposit transactions. Some may help customers find the right credit card.
With about 80% of tellers lacking a Bachelor’s degree, teller job losses threaten a pathway into the corporate world for women from less-privileged backgrounds, notes a college business professor. Teller jobs are relatively high-paying and have regular hours that allow workers to attend classes on the side.
Bank teller jobs are “an on-ramp to a middle-class lifestyle for people who don’t have more than a high school education but the decrease in teller jobs will take away one of those on-ramps,” noted the professor.
While the climb remains steep, some financial companies have managed to improve the gender balance within their executive ranks.
This is the story of three women within the finance industry – briefly, their different career paths.
BETSY DUKE
“I wouldn’t have been a banker without starting as a teller,” said Ms. Duke. After graduating from the University of North Caroline at Chapel Hill, with a degree in dramatic arts, Duke took a position as a part-time teller at First & Merchants National Bank in her hometown of Virginia Beach, Va – not because of any interest in the industry, but because she needed a job.
That started a career that would include stints as CEO, chief operating officer and chief financial officer at a variety of financial firms, as well as time as a Federal Reserve Governor.
“When you look at the bench strength in all of the banking world, the next generation of CEOs will include a number of outstanding women,” said Duke, who added that the movement of women into banking’s highest ranks is happening much slower than she expected, but she’s optimistic about the industry’s future, in part because banks have diversified their boards of directors.
TERI CURRIE
Ms. Currie, who leads Toronto-Dominion’s Canadian personal-banking operations, started with the lender as a teller after her first year of college. She stuck with the job throughout college “because of the interesting work and the steady hours that allowed her to continue her education,” she said.
Before taking the position, Ms. Currie planned to be a math teacher but after graduating, she decided to stay in banking. Many colleagues with similar decades-long banking careers started out in much the way,” Currie said.
“It was clear that there is and continues to be lots of opportunity at the bank to grow a career,” she said. “I’m a great example of that good fortune.”
(Editor’s note – No doubt she earned her ‘good fortune’ by continuously learning how to accomplish her daily tasks in the best way while pushing herself to expand her responsibilities. Good fortune often follows self-dedication, which is usually noticed by upper management.)
Currie isn’t concerned that a decline in tellers will set back women’s progress in finance. She noted that 53% of the bank’s overall hires recently were women and that women accounted for 54% of its promotions.
NANDITA BAKHSKI
Ms. Bakhski was (as of 2021) CEO of Bank of the West, which has headquarters in San Fransico. She started in banking as a part-time teller at a Northeast Savings Bank branch in upstate New York after immigrating to the U.S. from India, where she had already earned a Master’s degree in international relations. She ended up staying in the finance industry, moving through roles at Bank of American, Toronto-Dominion and other firms, before become Bank of the West’s CEO.
“What we need is a very strong pipeline and a very strong talent-management process, where you seek out women not only when they arrive, but when they are going through the process – when they are taking on new challenges,” said Bakhsi. “You’ve got to support them, mentor them and bring them along.”
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These brief career stories were based on an article written by Kevin Orland of Bloomberg News, published by The Philadelphia Inquirer newspaper on July 4, 2021 plus internet research.
