Serving as a trusted guide providing executive recruiting and project resources is a privilege. Every day at Katalyst Group, we seek to do just that — to help build high-performance teams and support professionals in reaching their career goals. But we also have a pressing objective — to empower women to go for leadership roles and grow their career, with a focus in corporate finance and accounting.
We believe in nurturing talent, and doing what we can in bringing female candidates into our pipeline and then into leadership roles within organizations. While progress has been made toward achieving gender equity within leadership teams, now is the time to keep the momentum going — with a sense of urgency to accelerate that momentum. According to Deloitte Center for Financial Services, by 2031, if organizations don’t provide clear paths towards advancing gender equity, progress will likely slow down or worse, become stagnant.
Power in Numbers
A tangible path towards advancing gender equity progress is the multiplier effect. As the name implies, for every woman holding a leadership role in the C-suite, there is also a positive measurable effect on women holding senior leadership roles. Globally, the multiplier effect is less remarkable, but within organizations, there is a powerful and real impact. According to Deloitte Center for Financial Services, for every added C-suite woman-held role there are four women who are added to senior leadership roles.
Here, women empower women, establishing a legacy of role-model worthy trailblazers. This is encouraging at a recruiting level, but also for women pursuing finance-oriented degrees and those in the early stages of their career — knowing that there is a real attainable future in advancing their career into the C-suite and other senior leadership roles.
Growth in the C-suite: Traditional and Emerging
Another pathway for women to fill leadership roles is looking beyond the traditional relationship reporting to the C-suite (CEO or to the board) and into a nontraditional relationship reporting to other C-level execs (Chief Strategy Officer, Chief Diversity Equity and Inclusion Officer, and Chief Sustainability Officer). Women holding nontraditional or emerging C-suite roles is growing at a faster rate than those in a traditional C-suite space. Over the last 10 years, this growth is double than in the traditional C-suite and has even tripled in the past five years.
What does this data mean for us, to our clients, to individuals in which we represent? It means that we support the growth of advancing women into the C-suite and senior manger roles — by taking an active part here at our headquarters in Chicago recruiting and empowering women who are pursuing their careers in corporate finance and accounting — so that the current talent and next generation are inclusively represented in executive leadership and senior management roles.
Since the beginning of 2023, 50% of the individuals hired through Katalyst Group into Manager, Director, and Executive positions are women — a pace we intend to keep going strong. From the day that Katalyst Group opened its doors, and will continue for as long as we are in business, our values and team support and embrace that diversity and inclusion is an integral part to an organization’s strategic plan and produces better outcomes for the organizations in which we serve.
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