‘Women shouldn’t try to be like men at work’
WALL STREET VETERAN SAYS THE ATTRIBUTES THEY BRING ARE INCREASINGLY VALUED
ack in 2002, Wall Street veteran Sallie Krawcheck was dubbed one of “the last honest analysts” by Fortune magazine. At the time, she was heading up independent research shop Sanford Bernstein just as Wall Street analysts’ reputations had come under fire, and was about to continue her meteoric rise, becoming the CEO of Smith Barney, CFO of Citigroup and head of Merrill Lynch Wealth Management before getting pushed out in a restructuring in 2011.
Years later, she is still the candid, direct speaker she was then. She purchased and renamed a professional women’s group called Ellevate Network in 2013, and in 2016, launched Ellevest Financial, a digital investing start-up aimed at professional women.
Now, she has written a new book, Own It: The Power of Women at Work. Her argument: The attributes women tend to bring to the job — relationship skills, an awareness of risk, a more collaborative, deliberative approach to decisionmaking — are increasingly valued, and women should showcase them.
There is a growing genre around books aimed at women and their careers after (Sheryl) Sandberg’s juggernaut. What did you want to do differently? I think they have all started a national conversation over the past few years that I’ve never been part of in my professional life. For Own It, what I wanted to do was give a view, a bit, of the future. Progress in gender diversity has stalled out. In Wall Street, shockingly, gender diversity has gone backward.
The business world is changing rapidly, and it’s changing in a way that takes the valuable skills that women bring to work and makes them more valuable. We direct 80 per cent of consumer spending. We control $5 trillion in investable assets. There really is now a way to engage that power that didn’t exist before.
When I was growing up in business I had very few options if a company didn’t treat me well. I could stay with that company, or I could go without much information to another. The power we have today — we’re more able to engage it.
Even a decade ago, highranking women in business didn’t like to talk about being a high-ranking woman in business. Why has that changed? I think there’s enough women in power now who are saying they recognise the research [about biases and stereotypes against women in leadership], but they’re not going to let that hold them back. For me, quite frankly, I feel like I’ve been so fortunate that if I don’t share these experiences, shame on me. I got fired, I got re-orged out another time. I want to work to normalise this a bit. Women take failure harder than men do.
You write about
diversity
I found Wall Street, even before the financial crisis, was always in crisis mode. What I would hear is ‘we’d love to put a diverse person in this job, but we fell to number three in the high yield tables in the northeast, and therefore we can’t take the chance of putting in somebody new. And so they’d fill it with a person who would almost always be the mirror image of the person doing the hiring.
When the issue of diversity comes up, and I’ve heard it even more in the last few months, some say there doesn’t need to be diversity of gender, there just needs to be diversity of thought. When you hear that, what do you response? Diversity of gender is diversity of thought. On average women tend to bring more of that relationship focus, more of the ability to see problems holistically — I could go through the list. Those trading floors on Wall Street that were populated with white men, had there been many more women, many more people of different colour, different orientations, etc, the financial crisis would have been much less severe. say in
CEO of Ellevest Financial
You’ve started Ellevest, a digital investing platform, after buying a women’s professional network. In what way has the political environment had an impact on the way you think about your brand? Women want to take action. We’re just finishing a survey of the network, and women are asking “what can I do to make things better? To help women move forward?” There seems to be sort of an awakening that we didn’t make as much progress as we thought we did. There’s a different energy among professional women right now.