Women in business 'mustn't be scared'

London - Globally, 24% of senior management roles are held by women, a figure unchanged since 2007, according to accounting firm Grant Thornton's International Business Report 2014.

Businesses with a female CEO account for 12% of all the companies around the world, and 32% of employees globally are women, according to the OECD report.

Women earn 17% less than men for similar skills and positions, according to the OECD's report "Closing the Gender Gap: Act Now", published in December 2012.

Just one in seven delegates attending the annual World Economic Forum this year was a woman, according to Grant Thornton's report.

Women made up 12% of company boards in the EU in 2010 and 18% of central bank boards in the EU in 2010, according to the European Institute for Gender Equality Index's latest report.

In the financial services industry, women make up 29% of senior roles and 11% of companies globally run a specific programme to support/mentor women, according to Grant Thornton data.

BNP Paribas 's CEO Jean-Laurent Bonnafe raised the French bank's target for women representation at senior roles from 20% to 25% in 2014.

A third of employees at Morgan Stanley are women and 27% of global Managing Director promotions were women in 2014, an all time high at the US bank.

At HSBC, 23% of senior roles are currently occupied by women. The bank wants to increase the ratio to 25% by 2014/15. Overall, women make up 52.3% of the 262 000 staff.

'Do not be scared'

It's a key lesson that Sophie Javary learned when she became pregnant early into a career in corporate banking, and found she was no longer on her employer's talent list and bonus scheme.

"I became very frustrated, so I left," says Javary, who 20 years later now advises BNP Paribas' most senior clients and coordinates the bank's corporate finance team in Europe, Middle East and Africa.

"You have to bite your lip and deploy extra energy to cope. That's what I did because I didn't want to be left behind."

Bee sting

A bee sting nearly killed Natalie Blyth in 2012 but the HSBC investment banker didn't take fright from the experience - she took inspiration from it.

Blyth is one of the highest ranking female bankers at HSBC. In between advising the likes of Diageo and Kraft on acquisitions, she also sits on the strategy and management committees which decide the future direction of Europe's largest bank.

Downtime for the 47-year-old, who is fatally allergic to bee stings, is tending to her beehives at home in Oxfordshire. Despite coming close to death once, she says maintaining the hives and watching the co-operation among their inhabitants offers a model to follow in business life.

"Beekeeping has become part of my soul; for me it's about risk. Risk, efficiency and productivity", she says.

Blyth applied this attitude to risk and reward when she took on HSBC's underperforming consumer M&A group in 2007, building it into a unit that in 2013 advised on $30bn worth of transactions including Unilever's $5.4bn deal to raise its stake in its Indian unit and China Mengniu Dairy Co's $1.6bn acquisition of Yashili International Holdings.