Ask a woman who has spent three decades in specialty finance what has changed, and she will often start with a room: a boardroom, a closing dinner, a trading floor or maybe a golf outing she wasn’t invited to. “When I started 31 years ago, I often was the only woman in the room,” says Teresa Harmon, co-office managing partner of Sidley Austin’s Chicago office. Bina Shetty, chief commercial officer at Percent, describes entering banking in the mid-1990s and spending “years as the only woman in the room — the benchmark was simply doing the work.” Lisa Rubano, who broke into commercial lending in the early 1980s, remembers something more specific than being outnumbered: “Despite having formal lending authority, my approvals required a male colleague’s sign-off before funding.”
That was the industry many of this year’s ABF Journal Top Women in Specialty Finance honorees walked into. It is not, by their own account, the industry that exists today — and it is not the industry they expect to see in five years. We asked the women featured in these pages two questions: What is the single biggest opportunity, and the single biggest barrier, for women advancing into senior roles today? And how has the role of women in the industry evolved over their careers, and where is it heading? We also fielded an anonymous industry survey to the same group, gathering 44 substantive responses on tenure, seniority, mentorship, sponsorship and the structural barriers women say are hardest to move.
The result is a portrait of an industry in the middle of a genuine, if uneven, transformation. Read together, the honorees’ answers and the survey data tell a consistent story: the ceiling has moved, and the industry’s leaders believe the next five years will look meaningfully different from the last 30. But they also agree, with striking consistency, on what is still holding women back — and it isn’t talent.
A Generation of Change, By the Numbers
The survey results put real numbers behind what the honorees describe anecdotally. Sixty-six percent of respondents currently hold C-suite, managing director or partner-level titles, and 77% have spent more than a decade in the industry — 41% for more than 20 years. These are leaders who have watched the industry change from the inside, not from the sidelines.
Asked to rate the current state of gender diversity at the senior leadership level, 75% chose “improving but still a work in progress” — the muted, unmistakably specific optimism of people who have lived through both the before and the after. Only 7% called it “still significantly lacking,” and another 7% called it “very strong.” The remaining 11% said it has been “largely unchanged over the past decade” — a reminder that industry- wide progress doesn’t always reach every firm or desk evenly.
On access, the numbers are more encouraging than the popular narrative around women in finance might predict: 66% said women in their organization have equal access to the highest-profile deals and client relationships “consistently,” and another 16% said “mostly, with some exceptions.” Just 7% described a clear disparity. Angela Kay, president of BasePoint Advisors, offers a version of this from her own career: she has watched her firm grow “from being one of three women in a 12-person firm to one of 34 women in a company of more than 100 employees” over six years. Cindy Park, vice president of operations and platform strategy for eCapital’s ABL Group, cites a similar marker of progress — women now make up 54% of the eCapital workforce.
The Opportunity: An Industry Still Being Built
If there is a single theme running through the honorees’ answers about opportunity, it is this: specialty finance is still young enough, and still growing fast enough, that the rules of who leads it are not fully written. That openness, more than any specific policy or program, is what many honorees point to first.
“Specialty finance is still being institutionalized in real time,” says Kay, “creating meaningful opportunities for women to shape industry standards, build influential relationships and help define the future of the asset class.” Shetty frames the same dynamic in terms of raw growth: “The biggest opportunity is private credit’s growth — the asset class is expanding into lower middle market and nonbank lending faster than senior talent can develop, which creates real upward pressure for women who build technical foundations early.” Jaime Caruso, managing director and head of lender finance at EverBank, agrees: “Specialty finance continues to evolve, creating demand for leaders who combine strong technical skills with sound judgment, adaptability and the ability to build lasting relationships.”
Others see the opportunity less in the market and more in the room itself — in the accumulating presence of women who are now senior enough to change who gets pulled up next. “The biggest opportunity is having more women in the room, so women earlier in their careers can see real examples of what it takes to reach leadership,” says Amy Bautista, chief investment officer at Kosmos. Tree Buckingham, managing director of specialty finance and revolver operations at Chicago Atlantic, describes a similar inflection point after 30 years in the industry: “The pipeline is stronger. The appetite is real. And the women coming up behind us are arriving earlier, better equipped and far less willing to wait for permission than any generation before them.”
A smaller but notable group of honorees pointed to technology — specifically artificial intelligence — as a genuine equalizer. “The definition of what it takes to succeed is evolving, and that creates an opening for women looking to advance,” says Robin Chiu, managing director at Portage Point Partners. Shetty goes further: “The defining divide in private credit will be less about gender than willingness to embrace AI… These tools reward curiosity and adaptability, not pedigree.” Laurie Martin Montplaisir, a partner at Krieg DeVault, sees the same shift as double-edged: “The pace of change presents a significant barrier, as professionals and organizations that fail to embrace and effectively incorporate AI into their practices risk falling behind.”
The Barrier: Sponsorship, Structure and Still-Unequal Rooms
If the opportunity side of the ledger is diffuse — growth, visibility and technology — the barrier side is remarkably concentrated. Across both the survey and the honoree responses, one word appears more than any other: sponsorship.
The survey found that 66% of respondents have had a formal mentor at some point in their career, but only 43% have had a sponsor who actively advocated for their advancement, rather than simply offering guidance. That 23-point gap appears almost verbatim in honoree after honoree’s answers. “The biggest barrier remains access to sponsorship,” says Rachel Jaffe Mauceri, a partner at Robinson+Cole. “Mentors can offer guidance and advice, but sponsors actively advocate for others, create opportunities for advancement and help open doors that might otherwise remain closed.” Amity Mercado, founder and CEO of Countify Capital, echoes the pattern: “Women still have fewer sponsors than mentors, and sponsorship is often what opens the door to executive opportunities.”
Structural, caregiving-related barriers rank just as high in the survey data. Nearly 40% of respondents (39%, tied with unconscious bias) named “inflexible work structures / caregiving expectations” as one of the two greatest structural barriers women face — a figure that lines up closely with what several honorees describe as the industry’s most persistent, least-discussed obstacle. Betsy Landoll, a director at J.S. Held, calls it directly: “The biggest barrier is the lack of adequate maternity leave and flexibility, which too often forces talented women to choose between building a family and building a career.”
Meghan Bruch, partner and head of diligence at Altriarch Asset Management, frames it as a retention problem rather than an entry problem: “The biggest barrier is not getting women into the industry but rather keeping them through the years when careers either accelerate or stall, which too often coincides with personal and family decisions that firms are still not well-equipped to support.” Juliana Obregon, an attorney at Cahill, names it even more bluntly as “the motherhood tax”: “It can be difficult to keep advancing at the same pace as women choose to have a family.”
Unconscious bias — tied with caregiving structures at 39% in the survey — is the other barrier honorees return to again and again, though rarely as a single dramatic incident. More often, it shows up as an absence of role models, visibility or access to the informal channels where careers are built. Thirty-six percent of respondents cited a “lack of visible female role models at the top” as a top-two barrier. Sarah Ciavarro, senior originator at First Merchants, connects the two directly: “The biggest barrier is visibility; women do not always see enough examples of leaders who have built meaningful, long-term careers in this field.”
Nearly a quarter of respondents (23%) also flagged “networking cultures that don’t include women” as a structural barrier. Sarah Stanton, general counsel at Trinity, put it plainly: women’s biggest opportunity is “to build genuine connections with their colleagues, business partners and investors. This can also be the biggest barrier, as women aren’t always invited to the places where connections can be built (e.g. the golf course).” One anonymous survey respondent, reflecting on 35 years in finance, was candid about how far the industry still has to go: “There are still moments when I feel I have to work harder than my male counterparts to prove my expertise, credibility and capabilities.”
Several honorees named a subtler, internal version of the barrier. “The biggest barrier is women not claiming their place,” says Buckingham. “Not waiting for the invitation. Not waiting for the perfect moment or the formal ask or someone to finally notice. Just arriving.” Dana Bota, a compliance officer with more than 20 years in the industry, describes it similarly: “The biggest barrier is often self-imposed limitations — too many talented women underestimate their capabilities [and] wait until they feel fully qualified.”
How the Role Has Changed — and Where It’s Headed
Ask honorees to look backward, and the arc is strikingly consistent regardless of discipline. Betty Boyle, who began her banking career at First Pennsylvania Bank in the early 1970s and is now 84, remembers being told by a hiring manager, “Three kids, you won’t last long.” She stayed. Today, she says simply, “Women today have the same opportunities as men and can achieve unlimited growth by consistently doing their best.” Lena Surilov, describing the earlier years of her legal career, notes that “women were well represented in junior associate and analyst positions, but we were far less prominent in senior leadership roles, revenue-generating positions and executive decision-making. I have seen a shift in the past five years.”
That shift, in the honorees’ telling, is not incremental — it is structural. “Women are no longer simply earning a seat at the table,” says Caruso. “They’re leading business lines, building platforms and helping shape the future of specialty finance.” Michelle Goodbread, regional president of CB&S Bank, describes the same arc: “I’ve seen women move from proving they belong to leading businesses, influencing strategy and driving meaningful change across specialty finance.”
Looking forward, honorees converge on a small number of themes for the next five years: deeper representation at the very top, more intentional sponsorship pipelines and — repeatedly — the integration of technology into how deals get sourced, underwritten and closed. “The next five years may matter more than the last 30,” Shetty says. Avisha Khubani, chief credit officer at Runway Growth Capital, expects the shift to compound: “I expect that momentum to continue as more women step into the roles where capital is allocated, risk is managed and organizations are led.” Melanie Guzman, executive vice president of factoring at nFusion Capital Group, frames the next phase less in terms of headcount and more in terms of exposure: “I hope the next five years are focused not just on increasing representation, but on intentionally giving more women early exposure to executive-level conversations so they can develop the judgment and confidence that leadership requires.”
What the Numbers — and the Honorees — Are Asking For
When we asked survey respondents, in their own words, for the single most meaningful change the industry could make, the answers converged with unusual consistency around one idea: make sponsorship deliberate. “The most meaningful change would be shifting from mentorship to sponsorship,” one respondent wrote. “Many women receive advice and support throughout their careers, but fewer have senior leaders actively advocating for them in promotion, hiring and business development decisions.” Another put it in a single line worth quoting in full: “Make sponsorship of the next generation intentional, not incidental, and pair rising women with strong senior leaders who will actively advocate for them.” A third connected sponsorship directly to opportunity itself: “Give talented women responsibility early. Confidence is built by making decisions, solving difficult problems and being trusted with meaningful work — not by waiting until someone feels 100% ready.”
Others focused earlier in the pipeline — on the fact that specialty finance, for all its opportunity, remains largely invisible to young women choosing a career. “Too often, students in high school and college have little exposure to the opportunities available in commercial finance, lending and capital markets,” one honoree wrote. “From the outside, it can appear to be an industry dominated by men in suits … The reality is very different.” Ciavarro made a similar point: “More awareness and education at the college level will help women see this career path earlier.”
Taken together, the honorees’ answers and the survey results describe an industry that has largely stopped debating whether women belong in specialty finance — the data on tenure, seniority and deal access make that case on their own — and has started debating something more specific: how fast, and how intentionally, it will move the remaining structural barriers. Unconscious bias, caregiving unfriendly work structures, exclusionary networking cultures and, above all, the gap between mentorship and sponsorship are not abstractions in this data. They are the concrete, named answers nearly every honoree gave when asked what stands between talented women and the top of the industry.
What’s notable is how little disagreement there is about the diagnosis — and how much confidence there is about the trajectory. Harmon, three decades into her career, put it simply: “Now specialty finance is an arena where women lead, where career trajectories are strong and where women have tremendous opportunity to excel professionally and personally.” Jennifer Sheasgreen, who co-founded SixCap Healthcare Finance this year after two decades in the industry, frames the next chapter as a matter of definition rather than permission: “It’s been incredibly rewarding to see more women leading authentically, building divisions and businesses, and helping redefine what leadership in our industry looks like now and into the future.”
The room has changed. What comes next — according to the very women who changed it — is making sure the next generation doesn’t have to fight for a seat. •
Rita E. Garwood is editor in chief of ABF Journal.