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Eileen Mercier, a corporate director with Canada’s Intact Financial Corporation, has long been a senior player in finance. She realizes her success in the finance world is quite rare for a woman, especially starting as it did in the late eighties, as CFO of publicly listed pulp and paper company, Abitibi.
Speaking to Insurance Business, she says a mixture of personal positivity, good breaks, and generous mentoring helped her. She concedes the male dominated nature of the wealth industry, but says women are in a great position now, as they can benefit from the public demand for gender equality and diversity.
This demand is being driven and nurtured by powerful awareness campaigns like #MeToo, which became a global phenomenon following the Harvey Weinstein sexual assault scandal. Some are concerned that #MeToo worsened the professional chances of women by putting senior men on the defensive, but Mercier believes the demand is provoking hardcore male dominated sectors like tech and engineering to proactively seek female candidates.
She says: “As long as you're working in those fields, you're going to work. I have granddaughters now who are entering the business world. One of them is a mechanical engineer and the other one is in computer science. I said to them: you will always work because you have the discipline that others value, and you're female.”
In wealth management, male domination, says Mercier, is due to tradition, but that the tradition is changing because many brokerages are family businesses: “Daughters … are taking over family businesses,” she says, and these women are changing the face of the industry.
Mercier, who was this year inducted into the Canadian Women’s Executive Network’s Hall of Fame for having won The 100 Most Powerful Women award four times, says women need to promote themselves more, and have more confidence. She says women often feel they are not ready for a promotion when they are ready.
Mercier is an optimist. “I tend to see the best in situations that have come to the worst, which might lead me to take more risks than your average,” she says, and adds: “I do think that there’s an advantage to seeing the art of the possible.”
