Story 265
To Story 264. Fraser appeared to do a lot for women when she first became CEO; I’ll give you that. But it’s clear now that it was a performative kiss-ass to the Biden administration. The minute Donald Trump was in office, she dismantled DEI, going so far as to forbid anyone from attending or supporting women’s events.
In the 2025 global gender equality ranking (Equileap), Citigroup dropped 54 spots among the top 100 banks. To quote ChatGPT: “It wasn’t a small wobble — it was: the largest decline of any major bank in that ranking and among the largest drop ever since the stats were collected.”
What’s more, she let the head of wealth oversee such a destruction of women in the business that Citi went from having four to six high profile women consistently on American Banker’s Most Powerful Women series, (when Corbat was in charge) to just two this year: her and the head of CC.
Also, for the first five years of her tenure as CEO, she failed to have a single woman running a P&L as a DR. In fact, she had 16 or 18 men on her ELT and the only two women were her chief of staff and CHRO. It is my understanding that [REDACTED] was elevated to a direct-report role only because a major newspaper was preparing to highlight the lack of a woman with P&L responsibility on her leadership team.
All of this tracks because many women have commented on this site that she is a Queen Bee who is threatened by competent women.
Finally, she has done nothing to address the broader cultural concerns that women continue to raise – around access to opportunity, sponsorship, and whether the organization is truly becoming more inclusive in practice, not just in messaging.
But by all means, let’s glaze her because she’s female. As if women aren’t usually the worst enemy of other women.