Citibank and Ford Motors send top execs to the Baltic coast
Why did Citibank and Ford Motors send top executives to the Baltic coast recently?
Because those people are their customers, present or future. It made good business sense to them. It also was a sign that the finance and hardware companies, not just the perfume and face-cream folks, take seriously the financial clout of Polish women.
For both Ford and Citibank, it was a first-time foray into sponsoring anything related to women here. Ford sent its top marketing/communications person, Dorota Poniatowska-Marczuk.
Citibank sent its public relations manager, Dorota Kaminska, but also four business executives: Maciej Bardan, director of CitiBusiness; research chief Jacek A. Luba; and sales officials Jerzy Sledziewski and Marcin Zaliwski.
"We believe this is a good direction. Events like this are very important, to build brand awareness, to make contacts," Bardan said. And, yes, they landed customers out of it, and they're still coming in.
Their clients already included the two women heading the associations: Ewa Plucinska of EVIP and Anna Janczewska-Radwan of the Medim, which sells German medical equipment.
How many Polish firms are owned by women? Open question. U.S. First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton referred to a number of 39% of all businesses being women-owned when she visited Poland about a month ago. That would include every mom-and-pop store. At the PAWE conference, Janczewska-Radwan estimated that women owned about 20% of businesses with more than 20 employees.
Bardan said Citibank dealt quite frequently with top women when taking loan applications but most weren't owners. "Many people we would see are directors of finance or chief accountants who often are women. We think of this as typical, that a lot of women are involved in business," Bardan said.
He was shocked when asked if there was credit discrimination in Poland similar to that which had been commonplace in the United States until Congress outlawed it in the late 1970s.
In Poland, the start-up circumstances for the new business sector were such that anyone with a better mousetrap idea could and did start small businesses. Many are prospering, some are huge.
As far as Plucinska, Janczewska-Radwan and Deputy Treasury Minister Alicja Kornasiewicz know, women haven't had any tougher time than men in getting credit. They don't know anyone at the government level who monitors that.
But their sense was that Poland has too many powerful women at the top of banking and finance for anything like that to happen. Maybe, maybe not.
In the United States after World War II, there was much "friendly persuasion" from the government, unions and women's magazines for women to leave the workplace and stay home to rear families and future consumers. That's similar, in a way, to the pressure being put on Polish women today by Solidarity Election Action (AWS) and the Catholic Church.
In the United States, millions did go home. Those who kept on working often lost their high-paying jobs to men coming home from the war and never found new positions that could match them. By the 1970s, however, stereotypes about women's "place" had emerged, which wrote them off as serious long-term workers. That led to keeping them out of the professional schools in law, medicine and business. And it kept them from getting credit mortgages, small loans, and credit cards. Congressional hearings revealed the assumption that all women were future mothers: that while they might be holding down a good job in their early '20s, they soon would marry, have kids, drop out of the workforce and therefore, at some point, they'd stop paying back those loans or credit card debts. Therefore, it made good business sense not to give them the loans or credit cards in the first place.
That kind of stereotyping was news to Bardan. "I've never heard that in banking you look at sex and make that a criteria. I've never even thought of it," he said.
The Polish Association of Women Entrepreneurs has more than 200 members today, up from a dozen 18 months ago. But they have been slow to get their own marketing act together. At the Hel conference, there was precious little about the PAWE group that could serve as a recruiting tool for newcomers.
Sue Drozda of Canada's Confederation College recently put on a seminar for 27 women business owners in Szczecin "and none of them had ever heard of PAWE."
Drozda heads a Canadian-sponsored business assistance center near Lodz, but did the seminar for women entrepreneurs in northern Poland for the Canada Poland Entrepreneurs Foundation, based in Szczecin and headed by David McRae.
As a Westerner, she is skeptical of claims that there is no discrimination against women here, including women in business. "But there appears to be no one monitoring it," she said.
"When you start investigating what problems women entrepreneurs have, it is different. It is restricted access to credit. Now is that because credit is restricted to everyone or is it only women facing problems?" Drozda said. She doesn't know.
