One woman in particular, Judy McCartney, had a front-row seat from which to watch women rise in the credit union movement. The former head of Orange County's CU, which now has $1.2 billion in assets and 91,000 members, was one of the few women at the helm of a credit union back in 1990.

McCartney is now in her eighth year of retirement in California, but her first credit union job, which she got while in her twenties, was in Alaska. She later moved to Southern California to take a marketing position at FAA Western FCU, now the $432 million SkyOne FCU in Hawthorne, Calif.

After that, McCartney went to the now $545 million Water and Power Community CU in Los Angeles, then jumped to Orange County's CU in 1982, which had about $60 million in assets at the time.

A man named Greg Smith was CEO; he hired McCartney to be his No. 2, putting her in charge of operations in the mid-1980s, when women held just 36% of management jobs.

When Smith left for a bigger role at another organization, McCartney jumped at the chance to become CEO. Smith now runs the $4.4 billion Pennsylvania State Employees CU, which is headquartered in Harrisburg, Penn. and has about 431,000 members.

But not everybody encouraged her to pursue it.

“There were some employees that said that absolutely I was not going to get it … they were used to having only men CEOs at the credit union,” she recalled.

Ultimately, she got the call she wanted from the chairman's office.

“They gave it to me under the condition I would be acting [CEO]. They would review it in a year,” she said. Five or six months later, however, the board made it official.

McCartney said she still remembers one person's reaction to her promotion at a local executives' meeting.

“A CEO who will go unnamed — he is no longer around — he patted me on the head and said, 'Oh, I've heard about you, little lady.' I thought to myself, 'Wow.' Nobody would dream of doing that now.”

Mentors were invaluable to her, especially Ludelle Murrow, who as CEO of Provident Credit Union in Redwood Shores, Calif., was one of the first women to run a large credit union.

“In credit unions, there were a lot of female CEOs but always of the small to medium-sized credit unions, and then when they got bigger they would usually bring a man in,” McCartney explained. “[Murrow] was a mentor to me, and I could pick up the phone and call and talk to her. She did awesome things, and she put together the first child care in a credit union anywhere.”

Though much about the world has changed in 25 years, caregiving responsibilities for children and/or aging parents remain a challenge for many women, and McCartney had to make tough choices then that many women still must make today.

“Credit union was before anything else, and probably if I had that to do over again, I would probably try and have more family life,” she said. “My whole life revolved around [the credit union]. I couldn't take a vacation for a family reunion, because the board meeting would be in the middle of it.”

McCartney's successor, Shruti Miyashiro, arrived in 2007 when McCartney retired. She was 36, had a bachelor's degree in philosophy and an MBA, as well as experience in operations, lending, collections, human resources and running a CUSO.

It also wasn't her first CEO job — she had been the CEO of the $118 million Pasadena FCU since March 2004.

“I told her all she has to do is grow the credit union to 10 times its size,” McCartney joked to CU Times then, referring to the growth OCCU achieved under her leadership.

Like McCartney, Miyashiro started her credit union career at the bottom, taking a part-time teller job in college. That is common for many women in the credit union movement, said Dawn Poker, who is the interim CEO for CUES.

“They'll come into the credit union, the smaller credit union, and start from the ground up. They may be tellers or they may be coming in as even a branch manager, and then they're able to make a movement toward the leadership role in different path,” Poker explained.

And that's exactly what Miyashiro did. She had planned to pursue a master's degree in hospital administration but scrapped it when the branch manager position opened up.

“I've never been afraid of rejection, and I've never been afraid to take an opportunity that seems too big on paper, and so I thought it would be great interview experience,” she laughed. “How in the world could a student fresh out of college who'd been in the banking industry all of seven months move into a management job?”

The answer was that functional knowledge can be learned; what the credit union wanted was leadership skills. “They must have seen something in me; they were willing to give me an opportunity,” Miyashiro recalled.

“I was very lucky because I think I came into the business and into this world at a time when gender differences were not as vast as they had been in previous years and for previous generations. I truly think people of earlier generations had to face many more challenges because of their gender, and they paved the way for people like me. I can't say, and I don't know if I'm unique in this, but I cannot say that gender differences have been an obstacle,” she said.

“I don't want a job because I'm a woman. I want a job because I'm qualified,” she added.

Given the incredible changes of the last 25 years, Poker said it's hard to speculate on how many women will hold the CEO title in the next 25 years.

“But I can't help but imagine that number is going to grow tremendously,” she said.