The role of women in credit union leadership
by: Matt Wilhelm
Taking a break from our regularly scheduled Credit Union IT Compliance discussions this week in honor of March being Women’s History Month. I read some interesting articles with statistics specific to credit unions that prompted me to write this blog. What got me started was this one: Women account for more than half of entry-level jobs in America, but they make up only 37% of mid-management positions and 28% of VP/senior management jobs.
So I did some research and, as I had suspected, the credit union industry has a very different story. According to CUNA, 57% of credit union CEOs overall are women. In fact, credit unions in the United States have a much higher percentage of female CEOs than other institutions and industries.
These numbers didn’t surprise me since A) I have a large number of credit union clients I work with where women lead the charge, and B) I work in IT, where the statistics for women in the work force could not be more opposite than in CU’s, so it is nice that the disparity does not extend to my client base. Consider these statistics of women in my industry – IT:
- 57% of professional occupations in the U.S. workforce are held by women
- Only 26% of professional IT jobs are held by women
