VIDEO: Crystal Ladder: Andrea Leung, Deutsche Bank

The Crystal Ladder award is for a woman who has climbed through the ranks to reach senior management.

Our winner, an Illinois native, started her Wall Street career in 1994 as vice president in equity derivatives at JP Morgan. In 2002 she moved to Deutsche Bank, where the team of synthetic equity traders expanded from 5 to 80 under her management. She is now managing director of relationship management at Deutsche Bank, where she focuses on sales strategy and cultivating senior management relationships for hedge fund, pension, and investment management clients.

She is active in women’s networking in corporate finance and markets, which is the toughest area in the bank to attract and retain women. She has a passion for helping women, and for her job covering clients — she combines the two because she feels that women still struggle to get ahead and initiatives need to come from “top down.”