FEWER MEN ON BOARDS, PLEASE
Philippine bank supervisor says women more intuitive, pay more attention to details and have more patience
THE Philippine central bank’s female deputy in charge of supervising the nation’s lenders has a message for their chief executives: Get more women onto your boards.
“Right now, we have a lot of women in big banks, but almost none are at the top,” said Chuchi Fonacier, 57, in an interview at her office, here. “We encourage diversity.”
The career central banker joins a growing global momentum to break down barriers to gender equality in senior corporate and government roles.
In the Philippines, men hold 82 per cent of the 265 board seats at the nation’s biggest lenders and some banks have no women on their boards at all.
Fonacier is one of two female central bank deputies. The other, Cyd Tuaño-Amador was also appointed last year.
When meeting bank presidents, Fonacier says two of her key requests are to toughen cybersecurity and to put more women in senior roles.
“There’s a different approach when women are involved. Women are more intuitive, pay more attention to details and have more patience,” she said.
Balancing boardrooms in Asia was complex because of the breadth of cultural variation. Gender discrimination in Asian workplaces was mostly “unconscious”, according to a study by INSEAD Emerging Markets Institute and Deutsche Bank AG.
In Southeast Asian countries like Malaysia and Indonesia, women face “deep-rooted cultural bias”, says Singapore-based Boston Consulting Group, adding that societal norms often pressure women to give up careers to raise a family, producing a gender gap in senior roles.
In her 34 years at the central bank, in roles that went from counting cash in banks’ vaults to investigating the nation’s biggest financial scams, Fonacier said she had to chart her career differently from male colleagues.
“As a woman in an industry that’s full of men, you have to be factual and stick by the rules,” she said. “You can also never arrive at decisions or deals in golf courses or over a bottle of beer. It’s seen as unbecoming of a woman.”
In the Philippines, authorities want to replicate the progress made in Thailand — where a woman led the central bank from 2006 to 2010 — in increasing the number women in senior financial roles without specific legislation.
“Change is inevitable,” said Fonacier. “Maybe if they see that the one supervising them is a woman, then there’ll be more women in boardrooms.”