{"id":24592,"date":"2019-03-28T01:18:15","date_gmt":"2019-03-28T05:18:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/test.greenmoney.com\/2025\/?p=24592"},"modified":"2020-01-03T14:38:01","modified_gmt":"2020-01-03T19:38:01","slug":"women-in-the-field-of-finance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/test.greenmoney.com\/2025\/women-in-the-field-of-finance\/","title":{"rendered":"Women in the Field of Finance"},"content":{"rendered":"
>> Back to April 2019<\/a><\/div>\n

This will be my fifth year contributing to this GreenMoney<\/em> issue dedicated to Women and Investing. In the past I have discussed studies showing that women are good, that is, above average, investors; I have discussed my discomfort with making gender the only lens through which people make investment decisions, but I have not discussed the process by which a firm, like the two I am involved with, makes the move from minority female to majority female. Nor have I discussed one woman who was particularly important to my own advancement.<\/h3>\n

\"\"Domini Impact Investments has five employee equity-owning managers in leadership. Four of the five are female. The Sustainability Group has four partner-level members and three of the four are female. I feel pretty secure in stating that female leadership is possible, even within the financial asset management field.<\/p>\n

When I asked the CEO of Tucker Anthony & RL Day to allow me to try to pass the exam necessary to earn a license that would allow me to be involved with the sales of securities in 1974, it was not totally unheard of. After all, plenty of men had secretaries who held the license. That way business could be conducted on behalf of some guy while he enjoyed a game of golf. It was unusual, however, upon passing the exam, to have been given a seat selling.<\/p>\n

It took me a while to realize that I was the only female in the firm with a full-time sales job. But the times they were changing. I was the unknowing beneficiary of a movement that was powerful and sophisticated.[1]<\/span> I\u2019d like to say it was enlightened management, but it was the power of people being allowed to file a class action lawsuit. Dating back to the late 1960s women had been trying to break into real jobs on Wall Street. It wasn\u2019t happening. But when a lawsuit was filed, disclosures were available to the press. One damning statistic made public was that as of May 1973 nearly 97 percent of Merrill Lynch\u2019s 5,197 account executives were white males. Another was the fact that the hiring questionnaire asked, \u201cWhen you meet a woman, what interests you most about her.\u201d<\/p>\n

Here, the most points were awarded if the candidate answered that it was her beauty, and the fewest if he answered that it was her intelligence. The company countered criticism and stated that the testing was fair, but eventually it settled and set in place gender diversity initiatives. My timing had been good; Tucker Anthony did not want the sort of headlines Merrill Lynch had suffered.<\/p>\n

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