Emerging unscathed from the eye of the firestorm that has raged through the banking world over the past two years, Mandy Mannix pours scorn on the idea that women cannot succeed in the financial sector.

Mannix, 39, is global head of Capital Introductions at Nomura, the Japanese bank that bought the European and Asian operations of Lehman Brothers on its collapse in September last year. It is a role that Mannix previously held at Lehman. It involves responsibility for billions of dollars invested by a slew of hedge funds, pension funds, charities and banks. It is also a job traditionally dominated by men.

However, Mannix refuses to use the term “glass ceiling”. She finds it over-emotive and inaccurate when applied to the financial institutions through which her career has risen dramatically over the past 18 years.

She left school in Australia at 14 and it was not until she landed a temporary job as a marketing assistant in Melbourne that her career really began to take off. “The arrangement was that they would promote me and I would study,” she says.

“In the past my role has absolutely been held by men. But in recent years that has begun to change. I don’t think there has been any resistance to this from the guys. Although people in these roles do tend to stay in them for a long while, so it’s an evolution rather than a rapid change.”

Attitudes have certainly changed since the early 1990s when Mannix joined the industry.

“Obviously in the early days there were attitudes that would not be considered appropriate now,” she says. “But I have always felt that hard work and talent have been good enough and I have never felt that a man has been promoted over me. Indeed, I have often been helped and mentored by men.”

Maddix moved to the UK in 2000, specialising in hedge funds for Merrill Lynch. She moved to Lehman in 2003 and in 2006 won the outstanding achievement category of the Women in Banking and Finance award. The following year she took the Women in the City achievement award. “I’m keen to show young women that this is an industry in which you can work flexibly, still have a family life and succeed,” she says.

It is a view supported by her own experience of motherhood. “I came back from maternity leave in February last year on a four-day week. In March Bear Stearns collapsed and from then we were fighting fires until Nomura came in for Lehman. Since then we have been rebuilding the [capital introductions] business. It’s been an incredibly intense time and a lot of hard work. But at no point did I think I could not cope.”

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