The Chosen Few

For her part, Evelyne Sevin, a partner at recruiter Egon Zehnder in Paris, says that when companies make an effort to adapt to the work-life requirements of working mothers, they are rewarded with more loyalty compared with male recruits.

The first hurdle, however, is getting a fair crack at a promotion. "Executives choose candidates in their own image," notes Susan Vinnicombe, director of the Centre for Women Business Leaders at Cranfield. "It's not done maliciously, but promotion processes at the top definitely disadvantage women."

It's a situation that troubles Jesson of Pitney Bowes, as does the fact that women often have a different way of selling their CVs than their male counterparts, a fact often lost on corporate recruiters. "Even if a woman leads a project, she still says, 'We delivered' a result, whereas a man might well stress that 'I' delivered," she observes. "Unless employers are aware of the differences in communication style, they don't hear what women have actually accomplished."

But corporate efforts alone aren't enough to propel more women into the executive ranks. Women who have made it to the top of the ladder have an important role to play, offering advice to those still climbing. "If a woman coming through the ranks doesn't have a mentor, a role model who's successfully juggling personal and professional responsibilities, it's difficult to progress — even if a bunch of men are encouraging you," says Sarah Hunt, managing director of recruiter EquityFD in London.

Verluyten credits a female mentor early in her career, the head of corporate planning at Raychem, with "proving to me that a woman can have an impact on a company without adjusting to a male style." Now, Verluyten is able to be a mentor herself, and is helping to set up a networking group for women at Umicore.

"What hampers most women is a lack of awareness of their situation, so they are not given the flexibility necessary to balance work and family," Verluyten says. In some areas of finance, however, rigid deadlines make this sort of accommodating arrangement difficult. "At the year-end close, if you're in consolidation, there is no flexibility," she adds. That's why she recently advised a senior member of her team, who wants to have a baby, to move to a more flexible, project-based job in Umicore's finance department.

After watching too many "absolutely superior professionals" reluctantly drop out of the workforce over the course of her career, Verluyten is open to any new ideas that encourage more women to break into the executive ranks. "But we can't tell women that it will be easy," she says. "I work for a metals company. It's a man's world. It's always going to be hard."

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Eastern Promise

In the early 1980s, when Nevenka Cerovsky started her career in the accounting department of a bakery company in Zagreb, in communist Yugoslavia, "there were more open doors for women" than there are today, she says. "Now that we have adopted the business principles of the west, there appears to be a glass ceiling."

Cerovsky is one of the few women to be found in the executive ranks of Europe's former communist-block countries, and was the first Croatian woman to win the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development's Women in Business award last year.

Back in 1996, she broke new ground for Balkan companies by taking Pliva, a Croatian pharmaceuticals firm, public on the London Stock Exchange — a period she relished. "The top post in finance requires a lot of public engagement, which women are not always prepared to take," she notes. "This is not the case for me. I like to be in front of investors; I like to do deals; I like the capital markets." Yet she was always aware of her minority status — she used to hold meetings twice a year with the heads of the firm's 21 subsidiaries, who were all men. And while she never felt anything less than "an equal partner" among these colleagues, she admits it was a "funny situation" given the prevailing trends.

Now at Atlantic, a privately held consumer-goods distributor, she recently left the CFO post to concentrate on developing an investor relations strategy in preparation for a potential IPO.

Whether building up a team in finance or in IR, however, she insists that she doesn't allow gender to influence hiring decisions. However, she does admit that "men and women solve problems in different ways. The most creative teams are always mixed."

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