Thank you, Mariana, what a rousing speech. I really enjoyed that. We're ready to go for this next panel. I'm delighted to be here. Your Excellencies, thank you so much for hosting this Day Zero event for FIA and Horizons, the first time it's ever been done, but a really important topic. It was fascinating to hear the prior panel. I would just say personally, just my own personal story, and just one minute because nobody's here to listen to my personal story, but my parents always taught me and instilled in me this belief that I could do anything, which is funny because I'm one of four and both of my parents are engineers and none of us turned out as engineers, so we took it a little too literally. But as I started progressing in my career, I got to a point where I looked around me and I started noticing fewer and fewer women in positions of power and positions of leadership. I took the opportunity just to put together a few statistics of the current state of play within the financial industry right now. According to a Morningstar report on women and investment manager positions, only around 28% of global assets are under the management of women in 2023. Only 10% of Fortune 500 companies were led by women. And according to a report put together by Narrow the Gap, and this was back in 2020, so granted it was around COVID times, female CEO statistics show that women in executive positions earn 76 cents for every dollar a man in the same rank makes. So there you have a couple of statistics that I think will shape our conversation. Before we start, I do want to mention that Her Excellency S. Al-Sohaim, who was supposed to be here, she's from Saudi Tata Group, was not able to make it due to airplane issues or a connecting flight, so she sends her apologies. But to build on what Her Highness was saying in the prior panel, there have been massive strides made within Saudi Arabia as a key pillar of Saudi 2030. And I think there is a lot to be said for the fact that back just in 2022, the female participation rate was only 23.2%. It got to 34.4% in 2022, and that is already surpassing the target of 30% that was set by 2030. The latest number I believe is closer to 36-37%, so it keeps moving upwards. And you can hear how energized and how mobilized women are in Saudi society today. But without much further ado, I'm going to start the panel now. Gan, I would love to start with you, and simply just a look back at your own personal journey. What support did you have as you were going up through the ranks?
Yeah, thank you so much. So I'm Jean, I'm the CEO of Wellington Management, which is a Boston-based investment manager, and I've been there my whole career, so I've been there for 33 years. I had a very unusual start. I graduated from Wellesley College, which is an all-women's college outside of Boston, and I started at Wellington when we were in a recession and there weren't many jobs graduating from college at the time. And I started as an administrative assistant. So I really started, when they say where did you start at Wellington, I started in the research department, but really opening mail. And over the next decade and the next number of years, I worked my way up to being a research associate on the research side, being an analyst. So most of my career I covered biotechnology and the pharmaceutical sectors, to being a portfolio manager, to being a managing partner about 10 years ago. So Wellington's a private partnership and there are three managing partners, and then to be CEO starting three years ago. And I would say there are, if I have to say, I think there are four or five defining moments. That one would be in 1993, I got to work with a man named Ed Owens who was the healthcare investor. He's probably the most successful investor you've never heard of. He was a very humble person, had a tremendous track record, and I got to work with him. And so I would say if there's any single person most responsible for my success besides myself, it probably would be Ed because he just was such an incredible mentor. I would say the second point, and just last week I went and had lunch with one of our CEOs for 20 years, he's 91, I had lunch with him and his wife, and I was telling him in 1999 I got my first portfolio management responsibility. And back in the 90s there weren't many women investors, there certainly weren't many women investors running money in the late 1990s, and certainly none that were pregnant with twins. So I got the assignment and I found out like days later I was going to have twins. And I flew down to the client, it was a big public pension fund, and you know what, they didn't take the money away. So I often say they gave me a chance, and that was pretty unusual.
Can I ask you whether you felt that you had to work harder because you were a woman?
Well, in the investment management business you have to work hard, you're sort of on all the time. So for me, I covered Pharmaceuticals and biotechnology. We have other people who cover HSBC and Google. Like my responsibility was knowing the industry back to front, public private companies, how is medicine going to change. And so it's sort of a job where you're never really on vacation and you're never really not thinking about the sector. But I don't think I had to work harder. I think I had to work smarter. You know, when I had, I have four daughters, so when I had young children I really had to work smarter in terms of how I spent my days. I didn't do a lot of extra, you know, I was very focused, very very focused.
Yeah, I can sympathize with that. Ruth, you have extensive experience in two industries really, the financial industry and also the tech industry as well. Both tend to be male-dominated, so I think everyone here would be very interested in hearing about your personal journey as well.
Well, first, it's great to be here and it's so wonderful that we're at the first Horizon Summit, and I presume the first of many. And when we keep coming back, those data points are going to get better every time, which will be exciting to see. So I started my career at Morgan Stanley back in 1987, and that's relevant because about eight weeks after I started in mergers and acquisitions was the biggest market correction on a percentage basis in the history of the world. And so the thing I learned pretty early in my career is when markets change, you should be open to changing. And it sort of set me on a path of always saying what's my highest and best use, as opposed to just sticking tunnel vision into one path. And throughout my career I moved around a lot at Morgan Stanley. I ran technology banking, I ran the equity capital markets technology area, I ran financial institutions. And that was the journey, every time I started to plateau I said what's my highest and best use, and a door would open. I think there were two really relevant experiences that I share often because I think as women are trying to rise up through the organization, they made a difference for me. And the first was when I was asked to take on technology equity capital markets, which for those of you who aren't familiar with it is basically on the trading floor and you take all the companies public. It was a wonderful time, the start of the internet kind of boom, but it's a very male-dominated area and a very male-dominated industry. And the senior partner who ran sales and trading called me into his office and he said, 'I think you're going to soar, but if you fall, I'm here.' That if you stumble, if you hit a roadblock, he didn't say fall, if you hit a roadblock, 'I'm here to backstop you. I am your senior air cover.' And what was beautiful about that message is he conveyed confidence that I could do extremely well in the area, but I had a ticket to call him anytime I want. And what I think is really important for each of us is to say 'I will be your senior air cover' and to always have somebody who is senior air cover. That was one critical point on the journey. The second critical one was I was running really interesting areas, started mergers and acquisitions, I covered private equity, created that business, then technology. And years into this, as I was doing my 'what's my highest and best use,' I went to someone who I trusted, respected, I thought put me ahead of an answer that was just a quick solve for Morgan Stanley. And he said, 'I think you should take over and run the financial institutions banking business, covering banks, insurance companies, asset managers.' And no offense, but my reaction was, 'Oh my gosh, that sounds so boring, like that's the last thing I want to do.' And he said, 'You got to trust me on this. It's just like technology, a quarter of the global GDP, multi-sector, you can do something with it and you're going to grow a lot.' And I trusted him. And so I think the other really important point is to have that person who knows you and wants to take risk on you, and be that person. It's sort of a corollary, and take the risk. That was 2006. So within about a year, when you're on Wall Street, it was clear the financial crisis was coming, which then led to me advising Secretary Hank Paulson, Ben Bernanke through the financial crisis. That was the reason I then became CFO of Morgan Stanley, which is the reason I became CFO of Google, which became Alphabet, and now the President and CIO. It was all that journey where my initial reaction was 'no way am I doing that move,' but I had somebody who I trusted, who I thought was ethical, thinking about what was the right thing to grow my career. Was that a man? Yes, it was. Throughout my career it's been men I've turned to because there are so few senior women. And I think the opportunity to have more of us who actually can bring a lot of the different elements to advice is great. But you don't, as Condoleezza Rice always used to say, if she waited for somebody who looked like her to advise her and coach her, she would never become Secretary of State with a specialty in Russia. So I think you go for the person who's extraordinary. And as with Noel here on the panel with us, men own a lot of the doors, can open a lot of the doors, and it's really important.
Well, you segued very nicely for me into Noel. And Noel, I actually checked, when you left HSBC, which was just a couple of months ago, 34% of all senior leaders were women. I'm curious to see from your perspective just how the industry evolved over the last, well, let's say couple of decades, because there has been a lot of change.
Yeah, let me just clarify here. When I first came to Saudi Arabia, and we had about two and a half thousand people in the market here, not specifically women, right? What are you seeing? The second round would be within that, how are women more affected, less affected? I think there's a little bit of interference coming through, maybe let's just sort that out. Okay, let's start again. So let me back up. When I first came to Saudi Arabia and we had about two and a half thousand people in the kingdom, and at that time, many years ago, there were probably less than 30 females working in the organization. If I think about today, we have over four and a half thousand people in the kingdom, and across the whole population, four and a half, I think we're around about 27% female. And if I look at the senior executive that run our domestic bank here in Saudi Arabia, I think I'm online now with 50% female representation at the senior executive level. Wow. Now that is a massive, massive transformation. And that was over what time frame? You're probably talking about 15, 20 years. Yeah, 15 years probably. Now if I think about what created that change, and it was leadership, it was creating an environment for people to be represented and to have opportunity. And if I go back, when people talk to me when I was group CEO of HSBC about what is one of the fundamental jobs of leadership, clearly everyone talks about you got to shape the strategy, deliver performance and everything else, but probably the most fundamental job of leadership is to create an environment where people feel valued, where people feel there are opportunities, and where people feel they can contribute. The most fundamental task of leadership is not only to create strategy but to create the environment for strategy to succeed. And I think what we've just heard is there have been times and moments in time when leaders have shown that they've created the environment for female talent to succeed. And a lot of people use the words diversity and inclusion as your standard terminology, that's part of management textbook. For me, I've always said the most important job is to create an inclusive environment. And if you create an inclusive environment, you will get diversity, diversity of gender, diversity of thought, diversity of whatever the aspect of diversity is. And that for me was part of my experience. I stayed with the group for 37 years because I had people who treated me as an individual, who nurtured me in my career, who gave me opportunity before I was probably ready for it. And the most important thing is that leaders embrace gender diversity and that thought diversity, racial background diversity, whatever it might be. Seems to be a common thread here that having that air cover, that sponsor, that mentor, the right leadership.
Can I just ask you from an institutional standpoint whether workplace arrangements had to change as well?
So it's fascinating. My biggest challenge globally, and I'm from the UK, my biggest challenge on moving diversity statistics was the UK. If I think about the markets in Asia, most of the markets I went to were 50/50 gender representation at senior management level. If I go to many of the European and the UK markets, I was lucky to get to 30%, very lucky. If I go back 10, 15 years, I was lucky to get to 20%. What is the reason for that? I don't think it's gender bias. I think it is harder in certain markets for people to balance, for females to balance work and life. And I think in those markets, leaders have to work even harder to create the environment, to create the mechanisms for people to have the ability to work and to bring up families and to have flexibility of working arrangements. In certain markets of the world that is much more prevalent than it is in other markets. So we had to work even harder in some of the Western markets to get gender diversity than we had to work in the emerging markets. It happened more naturally.
I think that if the goal is to see more women in senior positions or at least have the opportunity to rise up, I view it as a supply chain management issue. And if you have a supply chain management issue, you put rigor around what's the process that is not yielding the outcome that you want. And so at Google, we start with data, which is you need, if our goal is to actually be at least equal to market, how are we doing on attraction, retention, promotion? And when you actually have data, if you anchor everything in data, it's hard to argue with. It'll paint the picture of where there are gaps by level, by country. One critical element. I think the other critical element is clearly, I completely agree with Noel, it is tone from the top. If you're in a meeting and women repeatedly don't have an opportunity to be called on or given space to speak, you're basically saying I don't want your voice, I don't want you. And so reinforcing what are expectations and behavior, what assignments are people receiving that are door openers, that are the game changers that I had moving for example to take on the technology banking area or the financial institutions area, you need to be given, people need to take risk. And so how are you managing that? I think the other very important element of it is when you have a super high performer on financials but they're inconsistent with culture, which happens at banks quite frequently, what do you end up doing? Do you end up permitting it and look the other way? So I think there, that is all sort of a portfolio. There's a fly that's really interested in this conversation. There's a portfolio of process changes that must be undertaken if you want to enable and have the result that you allegedly claim you want to have. It doesn't just happen.
