Story 171

For forty years I worked inside one of the large wealth/wirehouse firms that dominate Wall Street. When I joined in the 1980s, the trading floor looked exactly as you might imagine: dark suits, louder voices, and almost no women. By the time I retired in my late sixties, the décor had changed, the technology had changed, and the diversity brochures had improved — but the basic dynamics did not. For most of my career I was one of the only women in the C-suite. That meant learning very early that competence alone was never enough. I had to out-perform, out-execute, and out-maneuver the men around me constantly to be taken seriously.

I thought it was important to get good at the informal systems where so many decisions are made. Golf, for instance. I play better than a good game, yet invites only came once or twice; once my peers discovered I was better than them at golf too, I was no longer welcome. (Although if the firm was sponsoring an invitational, I was always paraded to burnish their diversity image.)

In my early 50s, I was fired from a role I had spent years building. The indignity wasn’t that I was informed via FedEx — my boss didn’t have the guts to tell me to my face, which tells you exactly what kind of “leader” he was. But the real insult was when I learned my replacement wasn’t just less experienced; he wasn’t even qualified to have reported to me. In that moment, as I grasped the reality that I was out of work (being jobless over 50 as a woman is not a joke), I was more enraged by the idea that my female direct reports never had a shot at my role.

Over the years, I tried to open doors that had been closed to me. I also watched many talented women quietly decide the fight wasn’t worth it.

Anyone who denies that institutional misogyny and racism does not exist is simply unserious. The fact that women do such a remarkable job navigating this impossible system shows just how incredible and deserving we are — but shame on the firms that do nothing, organizationally, to make their cultures better for women. They are being willfully blind and for that reason I told my daughter to flatly avoid financial services as a profession.