Mainebiz

April 2, 2018

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V O L . X X I V N O. V I I A P R I L 2 , 2 0 1 8 16 F rom post-college bank teller to bank president and CEO, Pat Weigel has broken through the glass ceiling. Her career spans more than three decades, starting with a teller job after graduating in 1982 with a psychology degree from Denison University in Ohio. "At the time I thought it would be a temporary position," she says. "Once I got entrenched in the industry, I decided I liked it." Part of that had to do with starting in retail, a common entry point for women in an indus- try traditionally dominated by men. "Banking is really a people business." In 2001 she became Norway Savings Bank's fi rst female presi- dent and CEO, and today is one of nine women on an 11-person execu- tive leadership team. While she's still the only woman at the helm among the largest Maine-based banks, she's encouraged by progress at her own institution, where women now make up a third of the commercial and over half of the fi nance teams. "We're in the midst of a sea of change," she says. "Maybe the change has been a little bit slower to come to the country's larger banks, but in com- munity banks such as Norway, we are seeing a lot of change." Still few women at the top Despite cracks in the glass ceiling, the fi nancial services industry is still very much a man's world. A 2016 study by the New York-based consulting fi rm Oliver Wyman shows that the higher up the corporate ladder, the fewer women there are. It found that at fi nance fi rms in the S&P 500 stock index, women repre- sented only 1.4% of CEOs. at com- pares to 19.8% female representation on boards, 27.8% at senior level and 44.7% at fi rst- and mid-level. Why so few women at the top? e study concludes that while women enter the profession with the same ambition as men and retain that determination through mid-career, a signifi cant gap opens between men and women in their willingness to make sacrifi ces in their P H O T O / T I M G R E E N WAY F O C U S We're in the We're in the We're in the We're in the We're in the We're in the We're in the We're in the We're in the midst of a sea midst of a sea midst of a sea midst of a sea midst of a sea midst of a sea midst of a sea midst of a sea midst of a sea midst of a sea midst of a sea midst of a sea of change. — Pat Weigel Norway Savings Bank Pat Weigel, president and CEO of Norway Savings Bank, is one of nine women on the bank's 11-person executive team. CEO SUITE IN SIGHT Women blazing trails in banking B Y R E N E E C O R D E S

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