EuroFinance

Treasury is complex. Interest-rate risk, liquidity management, cross-border capital flows — the technical demands are well known. What receives less attention is a quieter problem: the ongoing challenge women face in making their expertise visible, their ambitions clear and their careers self-directed. At the EuroFinance Treasury & Cash Management Summit West Coast, Karina Inga-Kamienski, founder of Women in Treasury, and Dr. Liz Valadez, VP of Programming and Board Development at ALPFA,(Association of Latino Professionals For America) discussed the challenge for a women and treasury career.

The career sweet spot

Dr. Valadez opened with a framework she called the “career sweet spot” — the intersection of three questions: what are you genuinely good at, what do you love
doing, and what does your organisation actually need? The model sounds simple. In practice, she argued, most professionals — and particularly women who have built careers by saying yes to every assignment handed to them — struggle to locate it.
“The more you do,” she observed, “the harder it is to find.” Her own trajectory illustrated the point. Over three decades she had accumulated roles spanning product management, employee training and organisational development, each adding to her skills but obscuring a clear path. It was only when she recognised that
her real passion lay in developing people — bridging the gap between senior leadership and individual contributors during periods of change — that her path
sharpened into focus.
The practical implications were clear. She described a colleague: talented, hardworking, known personally to the CEO, and yet somehow stalled. The diagnosis was dispersal. She had spread herself across too many different opportunities, each plausible in isolation, none of them reinforcing a coherent professional identity. “Once Ashley narrowed down,” Dr. Valadez said, “now she’s speaking in stadiums to people at all big organisational events — because Ashley honed in.” Focus, in other
words, is not a constraint on ambition. It is the mechanism through which ambition becomes legible to others.

The framework had a personal lesson. Dr. Valadez described arriving at a new company and discovering she was not merely underpaid, but the lowest-paid person in the entire department — a consequence of never having negotiated her first salary. “I was a first-generation college graduate,” she said. “My parents were blue-collar workers.” The lesson she drew was not about salary negotiation alone, but about the cost of not knowing what you are worth — and the importance of naming it clearly.

The visibility challenge

Understanding your strengths is one thing; receiving recognition for them is another. Dr. Valadez was direct on this point. Women, she suggested, are disproportionately prone to what she called the “wrapped present syndrome” — solving complex problems without narrating the difficulty of the journey. A task estimated at an hour takes a week, because it turns out to involve three other people, an inherited systems problem and a dependency no one had mapped. Yet the work is completed as a polished deliverable, with none of the intermediate complexity visible to leadership.

“You show up at the end with this beautiful wrapped present,” she said, “and your manager wondered why it took you so long — because you weren’t communicating all along.” Her prescription was blunt: make the process visible. Volunteer for projects at the edge of your competence, particularly those the organisation has declared strategic. Add a passion project to your formal objectives — give it a name, a metric, a line in the annual review. “It forces your manager to talk about it. It forces your manager to recognise it.”

And under no circumstances, she added, should anyone allow a colleague to present work they have done themselves. “A lot of the times when you have a leader’s attention is when you’re actually presenting. Do not let others present your work.”

Empathy as competitive advantage

The discussion closed with remarks from Dr. Valadez that brought the morning’s themes together. Several participants had mentioned, during the group exercise, the importance of bringing people along — of making colleagues feel supported rather than judged. Dr. Valadez affirmed this instinct, and pushed further.

“Women tend to be more empathetic leaders,” she said. “They bring people along — and that’s actually a superpower. Because if your teams feel psychologically safe in their workplace, supported, then they will do great things.” The observation is not sentimental. Psychological safety — the condition under
which people raise concerns, share dissenting views and take creative risks — is among the most robust predictors of high-performing teams that organisational research has produced. What Dr. Valadez was describing, in the language of a practitioner rather than an academic, is a genuine and transferable competitive edge.

An eight-year network

Women in Treasury, the network that convened the session, has been operating for eight years. Karina Inga-Kamienski, senior director, capital markets at Gilead Sciences and founder of Women in Treasury, framed its purpose in terms that extended beyond professional development. The work of the network, she has argued, is not only to help women navigate their own careers, but to mentor the generation that follows — to make a lasting impact. The theme of Women’s History Month this year — Leading the change: women shaping a sustainable future — captures that ambition.