Bank Staff All Women

Press, Issue 32345, 10 July 1970, Page 2

Bank Staff All Women

(Newsweek Feature Service) CHICAGO. Stop in at the Northbrook Savins Association in the Chicago suburb at noon and you are likely to find the bank’s chief executives lunching on tuna salad sandwiches and doing their embroidery. A new mode of manual therapy for overwrought financiers? Not really. The bank’s president, secretary, treasurer and assistant vicepresident are all women. So are all five tellers. In fact, everybody who works for Northbrook Savings is a woman. “We once had a young man accountant,” recalls the president (Mrs Patricia Norling), “but he was drafted.” Northbrook’s offices are all wives and mothers. To a woman, they eschewed the jungles of commerce until it came time to pay the children’s college tuition bills. The bank’s corporate secretary is Mr„ Arlene Duggan, a pretty, blue-eyed blonde. Just last year, Mrs Lorraine Nowicki forsook her washing machine for an adding machne to become Northbrook’s treasurer. Mrs Evelyn Strauss, the mother of two. is assistant vice-president. Can the women’s liberation movement be far behind? Very far behind, says President Norling. “I haven’t any use for a bunch of stringy-haired women who think equality means tossing their bras into the river.” Not that she has any use

for male supremacists either. She recalls having an argument with one of the breed when she began working at Northbrook in 1960. He thought women should, be paid less than men. “My only answer to him,” says Mrs Norling, “was that grocers charge women the same price for food as they do men. And I haven't noticed any other businesses giving female discounts. “Certainly there are obstacles for women, but they are falling by the wayside as women become better educated and as men’s attitudes change. When I was a girl, if a married woman worked outside the house, it was because her husband was a failure or because she was a widow. That certainly isn’t the attitude today,” she said. Mrs Norling was a widow when she joined the bank—she has since married a Chicago television cameraman —as one of its original staff of three. She had been working for her father, a local real estate agent, to support herself and her three children.

She began at Northbrook as dictation secretary and backup teller. By 1963, she had risen to corporate secretary. The next year, she was named a director of the bank. All the while the staff was expanding with the bank’s growth and Mrs Norling became a major influence in its “feminisation.” She persuaded female friends to fill vacancies or new jobs as they became available, and was herself appointed managei when the bank’s president retired early last year. Then, last January, the board of directors named her president

Significantly, perhaps, she was chosen for the job by men. On the bank’s board more traditional banking moves prevail, and Mrs Norling is a minority of one The other six directors are all men. “Pat was picked,” says one of them, “because of her proven ability to run all facets of the association. She was the logical choice.” A few feminine touches are in evidence round the bank. Little vases of white daisies sit on each desk, and paintings by local artists hang on the walls. The bank’s executives also reserve the womanly option of not telling their ages. By now, most of Northbrook’s regular customers take their distaff bank in their stride. But newcomers occasionally do a double-take when entering the dignified white brick building for the first time. Recently one of them exclaimed: “Hey, they’re all skirts in here.” “Oh, we take a lot of kidding,” concedes Mrs Norling. She has become used to being greeted by males at parties with mock bows and “Madam President” And she is prepared for the surprised looks on the face of male mortgageseekers who come in looking for “Mr” Pat Norling. But when it comes to business, the women run their bank just as the men run theirs. They have the same concern over tight money, the same worry over the downward trend in home loans, the same uneasiness about high interest rates. “We’re being squeezed like everybody else,” says Mrs Norling. Then, with an un-banker-like smile, she adds: "Financially, that is.”