Business & Tech

Circle Bank CEO Helps Analyze Women's Status in Upper Management

Kim Kaselionis just got back from an invitation-only national conference set up by the Wall Street Journal about what women need to do step up corporate hierarchy.

Wall Street Journal readers might have seen a special series on women and the economy based on reactions and analysis gathered at a conference last week in Florida. Novato’s Kim Kaselionis, CEO/chair of , was an invitee and came back with a clear impression of what is holding back qualified women who want to graduate from middle management.

“Across the industries, profit and loss education was the winner in terms of what skill set the group felt young girls and women need to obtain to reach those corporate leadership positions,” Kaselionis said after getting back from the Wall Street Journal Executive Task Force “Women in the Economy” conference in Palm Beach, Fla.

“There needs to be a big push to get more women into math and finance, which is traditionally a kind of guy’s industry and a guy’s topic,” she said. “It’s very important as more and more women choose to marry later in life and be financially independent that they go back and take some accounting or finance classes. Right now ”

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Kaselionis, in her 15th year leading Circle Bank, estimated that only 1 percent of the country’s 7,000 banks have a woman in the CEO role. She joined about 150 other women at the conference, which included guest speakers such as retired U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor and academic and business leaders from all over the country. The mission was to assess the latest employment data and address key issues that affect businesswomen and their potential to reach the higher echelons of the workforce.

A report released at the Wall Street Journal conference showed that companies with women on their board were among the top 25 percent of financial performers and those with no women on the board were in the bottom 25 percent. Research showed the attrition rate of management-level women in some industries was found to be much lower than the average.

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Kaselionis she was proud of Circle Bank’s track record, which includes women holding one-third of the senior management and board positions. The total Circle Bank staff is about 75, and two-thirds are women, she said.

“I would like to hope we have an inside track in that category,” she said. “There are lot of things a company can do to support and foster the roles of women, and there are a lot of misconceptions about what women’s desires are in going from middle management to upper management.

“We have an opportunity at a local level to be an example of what it’s like to have policies within an organization to advance women up the lattice … that’s the word they use instead of ladder now.”

Kaselionis said she hoped the conference becomes an annual event and that there is lots of follow-up to the questions raised. Women are graduating from college and into the workforce at a greater rate than men, but their progress often stalls once they reach middle management, she said.

“There was a good cross-section of women who had worked their way through the glass ceilings,” she said, “and those people have a lot to say about what’d holding back women in the workplace and what’s going on in our nation to change that.”


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