Women still lag in leadership roles, even though they bring serious strengths to the job.

Despite the gains that women have made professionally, there is still a persistent gap when it comes to finance and real estate, especially at the top of the org chart.

A couple years ago, reporters looked at 50 of the world’s largest financial firms – leaders in lending, asset management, insurance and professional services – to see how many women vs. men they employed.

The results were mixed. Women accounted for more than half of those companies’ workforces. Among the junior ranks, women represented almost 60 percent of the head count.

But women filled only 25.5 percent of the top leadership positions, the Financial Times found. In some regions, it was worse – only 6.9 percent of senior positions at Asian-based companies were held by women.

Globally, 2 percent of bank CEOS are women, and they occupy fewer than 20 percent of banks’ board seats, the International Monetary Fund reported. (Though women are more likely to serve in leadership roles at savings banks and in low- and middle-income countries.)

If you look at commercial real estate only, women account for 35 percent of the industry’s U.S. workforce, according to a 2015 survey from the Commercial Real Estate Women Network.

And when it comes to pay? Median pay for women in the industry was around $115,000 while it was $150,000 for men, the CREW Network reported.

According to the CCIM Institute, only 550 (or 13 percent) of its Certified Commercial Investment Members are women – still an improvement from 1984, when the total was around 100 women.

The Advantages of Women in Leadership

But women do serve in positions of leadership? Their organizations tend to thrive.

The Peterson Institute for International Economics (PIIE) studied nearly 22,000 publicly traded companies around the globe in an array of fields. They found a correlation between companies with higher profitability and greater numbers of women in top positions.

Unfortunately, fewer than 5 percent of the companies studied by PIIE had women CEOs. Almost half lacked any women in the ranks of their senior leadership.

The Korn Ferry Institute interviewed nearly 60 women CEOs to discover what qualities, experiences and kills had allowed them to achieve the highest position in their company.

One thing that researchers noted: The surveyed women tended to rank much higher for humility and lower for confidence. In some respects, that can be a drawback because women are less likely to publicly take credit and push for promotions.

But it could also be a strength. Women CEOs were more likely to realize what they didn’t know and seek help. They were more likely to leverage teamwork to achieve greater results.

It takes women about 30 percent longer to reach the CEO level than it takes men, the Korn Ferry Institute found. They’re usually about four years older than men in comparable positions.

“The impact of having more women in senior leadership on net margin, when a third of companies studied do not, begs the question of what the global economic impact would be if more women rose in the ranks,” said Stephen R. Howe, Jr., EY’s US Chairman and Americas Managing Partner. EY helped fund the PIIE study.

“The research demonstrates that while increasing the number of women directors and CEOs is important, growing the percentage of female leaders in the C-suite would likely benefit the bottom line even more.”

Addressing Root Causes of the Gender Gap

Culture and expectations are part of the problem.

The CREW Network found that men in commercial real estate were more likely to aspire to the most senior positions – 40 percent of those surveyed wanted to end up with a C-suite position, while 39 percent wanted to be senior vice presidents.

For women, though, only 28 percent wanted to be C-suite. They were more likely to set an SVP role as their career goal.

That was echoed in the Korn Ferry survey of women CEOs. Only five of the 57 women interviewed had long desired to be a CEO. Heck, three only took the job out a sense of obligation!

At companies where women were only 1 in 10 of senior leaders, almost 50 percent of men thought women were “well represented” – and about 1 in 3 women agreed with them, according to the Women in the Workplace Survey from McKinsey and Lean In.

Women were also more likely to have their careers affected by their marriage or family – 20 percent of respondents, compared to 8 percent of men.

There’s also the reality of sexual harassment. A recent survey of women in housing finance showed that more than 70 percent of respondents had been sexually harassed, but only 20 percent told a manager, the Mortgage Bankers Association and its mPower networking group reported.

The incidents were more likely to happen when women professionals were early in their careers. About 90 percent of those who had been harassed were in their 20s at the time.

Encouraging the Next Generation

The good news is that different organizations are creating resources to support women professionals as they advance their careers.

The CRE Finance Council, an industry group for commercial real estate finance, operates the CREFC Women’s Network, a subgroup that pushes for professional development of women in the field.

The Mortgage Bankers Association’s mPower group for women delivers educational events, networking opportunities and other assistance.

“What started out as a hunch and was tested with a few starting events, we realized very quickly was filling a void,” said Marcia Davies, the Mortgage Bankers Association’s COO, said in late 2016, when mPower’s online platform launched.

“And the positive feedback we have gotten since clearly indicated that we not only are filing a void, but we also struck a nerve and need that’s out there.”

Simply encouraging women and opening their eyes to their potential can make a difference. As Jane Edison Stevenson and Evelyn Orr of the Korn Ferry Institute shared in the Harvard Business Review:

“It wasn’t until that conversation,” one woman recalled, “that I even imagined anything past manager, forget CEO. I really just wanted a good job with a good company. That conversation was a bit of a wake-up call.”