The Chosen Few

"I had to make a choice," recalls Martine Verluyten. "Was I going to remain eternally in the background, or would I fight to become CFO?"

She faced this decision shortly before her 50th birthday, after a long and varied business career. Rising through the ranks as an auditor — one of only two women in the firm at the time — she was put off accountancy as a long-term career option when, during a performance review, an incredulous (male) manager scoffed at the notion of her becoming the first female partner in continental Europe.

Shortly after that meeting, Verluyten packed up her desk and moved to Raychem, an electronics company, working for more than 20 years in a variety of finance posts in Europe and the U.S., "but never very close to the CFO role," she notes. In 2000, she joined Mobistar, a fast-growing Belgian mobile-phone company, as deputy CFO. When the incumbent CFO left six months after she arrived, it was the first time she faced a realistic shot at the top finance post. She knew, however, that her promotion from second-in-command would not come easy. After all, there were very few female finance chiefs at companies of Mobistar's size in Belgium — or anywhere else in Europe, for that matter — at the time. And Verluyten had not forgotten that fateful performance review at the audit firm.

After a "hard-fought struggle," Verluyten convinced Mobistar's board to appoint her as CFO, a post she kept for six years. In June 2006, she moved to Brussels-based Umicore, a €9 billion specialty metals group, also as CFO. She's now one of only two female CFOs at a company in Belgium's blue-chip BEL 20 index. (The other is Anne Vleminckx at imaging systems company Agfa-Gevaert.)

But compared with other European countries, Belgium is awash with female finance chiefs. Currently there are no female CFOs in Germany's DAX 30 or France's CAC 40, while just two have made it into the U.K.'s benchmark FTSE 100 index — Jann Brown of oil and gas group Cairn Energy and Helen Weir of bank Lloyds TSB. Weir also holds the honor of being the only female CFO among the 100 largest companies in Europe. Female finance executives fare slightly better on the other side of the Atlantic. Nine of the U.S.'s 100 largest companies currently have female CFOs.

The paucity of female finance chiefs in Europe is puzzling given the steady flow of women into finance over the past few decades. Women now account for more than half of university graduates in the EU, and around 30 percent of chartered accountants and MBAs. What's more, nearly a third of corporate managerial jobs in the EU are filled by women. Beyond middle management, however, the trends change. Just over 8 percent of European corporate board members are women, with most occupying non-executive director roles. The percentage of women who make it to Europe's top executive posts can be counted with a single hand, often with fingers to spare. By contrast, 16.5 percent of the members of US boards are women, as are 15 percent of the members of executive committees, according to Ricol, Lasteyrie & Associés, a Paris-based consultancy.

Still, progress has been made. In a 1965 study published in the Harvard Business Review, implausibly titled "Are Women Executives People?," only a quarter of 2,000 workers — half men and half women — said that they would feel comfortable working for a woman. Nearly two-thirds said that companies would never accept the idea of female executives.

Balancing Acts
Although attitudes have changed categorically since the 1965 survey, the pace of change has been slow. Last year, 13 percent of director vacancies at FTSE 100 companies in the U.K. were filled by women, down from 17 percent in 2005 and barely up from 12 percent in 2001, according to the Cranfield School of Management in the U.K. Among the U.K.'s 350 largest companies, the percentage of female CEOs rose from around 1 percent in 1997 to 3 percent last year, while women fared marginally better in finance, with the share of female CFOs rising from 2 percent to 4 percent over the same period.

Monika Hamori, a professor at the Instituto de Empresa in Madrid, has been studying the career paths of executives at the 100 largest companies in Europe and the U.S. over the past 20 years. She found that women disproportionately outnumber men in "important mid-tier positions" — that is, the proportion of female senior vice presidents to the total number of female executives is far greater than the comparable figure for men.

For the few women who scale to the top of the corporate ladder, it can be a swift ascent. Compared with their male colleagues, female executives are younger, take less time to reach the top and hold fewer jobs on the way up. Some notable CEO appointments in the past year have also come via finance, including former CFO Indra Nooyi at American beverage company Pepsi, Monika Ribar at Swiss logistics group Panalpina and Mia Brunell at Swedish investment company Kinnevik.

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