Life and lending reform: managing a career in mortgages

By Rincey Abraham

According to The Credit Suisse Gender 3000 report, women in top management positions tend to be placed in roles with less influence and fewer promotion opportunities. Women represent only 4 percent of all CEO roles and instead are placed in CFO/strategy roles, such as investor relations.

Banking and mortgage lending do not seem to fall too far from the nationwide, and international, trends. Credit Suisse Research found that females made up 7.5 percent of bank CEOs, 12.1 percent of operational management, 14.6 percent of CFO/strategy and 24.8 percent of shared services.

Courtney Schaefer, director of operations at Draper and Kramer Mortgage Corp., has been in the mortgage lending industry for more than 20 years and has noticed the lack of women in upper management positions.

“In terms of the mortgage banking industry, I saw predominantly men,” Schaefer said. “There were women account executives in sales and I would say probably more women in sales than in truly suite level roles. That was more male-dominated.”

The Credit Suisse Gender 3000 report found that progress has been made in general over the years. Looking at 2010 to 2013, the percentage of women on boards within the financial industry has increased from 11.3 percent to 14.8 percent.

However, there are still clear divides in the specific types of roles that women hold, including in the mortgage lending industry overall. More women are taking over operational roles, but upper management positions are still mainly male-dominated, Schaefer says.
“I feel like I am in a men’s world,” Schaefer says. “I hate to say that but it is a more male dominated world.”

Schaefer has been with Draper and Kramer Mortgage Corp. since 1996 and has changed roles and departments throughout the years that eventually led her up the company’s corporate ladder to director of operations. Some of those decisions came through changes happening in her personal life that required her to move from her operations role to a sales role.

In 2002, Schaefer had her first child and made the decision that she wanted to stay home and work part-time. She says that she was originally worried about the way that her pregnancy and motherhood would impact her career because she wanted to continue working, but knew that it was not possible to stay in an operational role.

But Schaefer knows that it all worked out for the best. Because the mortgage industry was in the middle of a large refinancing boom, there was a significant amount of opportunities available for her to work at home and still be successful and involved at the company.

“I was lucky in that sense and I was able to keep my foot in the door here at the company and keep current with what was going on in the industry and it was an easy transition then,” Schaefer says.

Schaefer went back to a full-time position in 2009. At that point, she had begun doing some part-time operational work, and that made it easier for her to transition back into a full-time operational role because she stayed connected with the company. This was also before the major changes that were on the horizon for the mortgage industry.

“I got back in kind of before the storm hit when all the compliance and consolidation and a lot of things. So it was a key time that I was back because I would’ve had a harder time with all the trends and the changes in our industry with compliance,” she says.

The Credit Suisse Gender 3000 report notes that there are a number of obstacles that women face on individual, cultural, workplace and structural levels that keep them from moving up the corporate ladder. This includes work-life balance priorities, spousal roles and the need for face time at the company and flexibility.

However, Schaefer notes that while there is a perception that women are not able to commit as much to their careers because of their families, it is not actually the case for the women she knows who are in the workplace.

“I think women care more in general and go above and beyond because they do care so much,” Schaefer says. “Working women are super go getters because they are working and basically running two jobs at one time.”

The research backs this up: Credit Suisse Research found that companies with more than 15 percent of women in top management carry a 2013 returns on equity (ROE) of 14.7 percent, compared to 9.7 percent for those where women represent less than 10 percent of the top management.

In the end, Schaefer notes that she does not want to be treated any differently just because she is a woman. She thinks that her skills, work ethic and performance speak for why she was able to get to where she is in her career.

“I don’t want to be looked at different because I have as much to offer as a man does. It shouldn’t matter my gender,” Schaefer says. “I do think I get looked at different because of my gender. But, from my point of view, I do everything just like any other person would do.”