WOMEN FINANCIER

Timaru Herald, Volume CXLV, Issue 21186, 5 November 1938, Page 11

WOMEN FINANCIER

UNUSUAL VOCATION DIRECTOR OF BANKS Londoners who go down one of the narrow turnings off Cannon Street come unexpectedly to St. Lawrence Poutney Church corner. Coming there unexpectedly, the stranger has a feeling of having turned back the pages of life into the London of yesterday. Actually one is very much in the London of to-day, for here, less than the proverbial stone’s throw from the old-world corner, are the offices of Miss Gordon Holmes, who has made for herself a most notable career.

Miss Gordon Holmes is joint manag-ing-director of the National Securities Corporation, Limited—one of the largest and best-known outside financial house in London. She is also a director of two Continental banks and of one or two other companies. Her Work for Other Women Apart from all this, she is intensely interested in the welfare and progress of women, and is proud of being chairman of finance of the International Federation of Business and Professional Women, which has 10,000 members in all parts of the world. When one refers to Miss Gordon Holmes as being a financier one uses a vague term which baldly expresses her work. But as things are it is the only definition which can be used. She herself admits it, states a London writer. “No reference book contains my classification,” she said, “because there is still no known method in England whereby women can qualify for a financial career—for stockbroking or for banking. “The only vocations in England still closed to women are the Church and the Stock Exchange. Why this peculiar combination of God and Mammon should be raised against women I do not know.” , Miss Gordon Holmes explained that at 19 she became a typist at £1 a week with a firm of Danish produce merchants. Then she met a Canadian director of a financial house in London who gave her a job at £2/10/0 a week. War came and while the men were away Miss Gordon Holmes took charge, rising during eight years to £2O a week. “Then I looked round for some method of earning much more than twenty pounds a week, and I found a group of people who were wilhng to back myself and a man partner in establishing our own financial house. Successful Result “That was some 15 years ago. and, in spite of slumps and booms, the results have been entirely satisfactory to ourselves and our backers.” A great believer in business careers for women, Miss Gordon Holmes cannot understand why so few women in this country take up financial careers as compared with the number in America. That women are qualified to do such work there is no doubt, and Miss Gordon Holmes’ own career answers many questions which may be raised by those who imagine that financial work is outside a woman’s powers. She herself answers the other arguments sometimes advanced—that such work must kill femininity and interest in womanly things. Most confidently, Miss Holmes believes in women, and in their ability to achieve success. She regards it as foolish foi-parents to put their daughters into blind alley jobs because they are “so safe.” The job that matters is one which gives scope for all one’s powers, which will lead in the end to success—the job which perhaps is based more often on enterprise than safety.