The creation of the first stock market can be traced to a day in 1792 when 24 brokers gathered near a buttonwood tree at 68 Wall Street in Manhattan. The brokers — all men, of course — designed a commission system for executing stock trades and established rules to ensure an orderly process. The earliest version of the New York Stock Exchange sprang from this pact and operated from the nearby Tontine Coffee House, where merchants, traders, politicians and hangers-on jostled to place bids as horse carts and wheelbarrows jammed the street below.
Today, the capital markets system referred to as Wall Street bears little resemblance to that original iteration. Investment banks and brokerage houses may be based anywhere and securities change hands at the speed of light through unseen digital networks. One of the few things that remains stubbornly consistent within the multi-trillion-dollar financial industry is its status as one of the world’s most intractable boys’ clubs.
Two great wars, the women’s and civil rights movements, the #MeToo reckoning and a potential female president haven’t done much to alter this fact. Women now make up more than 40 percent of business school enrollments and 52 percent of entry-level finance jobs, but they remain underrepresented in most positions of power in finance, filling only around 27 percent of C-suite roles, according to recent estimates.
The lack of female leaders is surely not unrelated to the moderating but still steady stream of gender discrimination tales; women have been fighting nearly since the time of the buttonwood tree to be accepted by the finance industry. In “She-Wolves: The Untold History of Women on Wall Street,” the historian Paula Bren takes us on a lively journey through many of these women’s careers, showing how ingenuity and dogged persistence led to occasional bursts of success.
In the latter half of the 1800s, Bren reports, the sisters Tennessee Claflin and Victoria Woodhull worked as clairvoyants and fortunetellers before persuading the railroad magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt to bankroll their own brokerage house (the fact that Claflin became Vanderbilt’s lover may have had something to do with his generosity). With Vanderbilt’s $7,000 investment the women opened Woodhull, Claflin & Co., where lady investors could slip in through a back door to make deposits. They attracted the attention of Walt Whitman (he called their firm “a prophecy of the future”) and the suffragist Susan B. Anthony. “These two ladies (for they are ladies) are determined to use their brains, energy and their knowledge of business to earn them a livelihood,” she wrote. “The advent of this woman firm in Wall Street marks a new era.”
The new era had its limits. Barred from nonclerical jobs at most banks, and from the stock exchange itself, women started their own professional organizations, such as the National Association of Bank Women and the Women’s Bond Club. The Pennsylvania Railroad was referred to as the “Petticoat Line” owing to the high number of shares owned by women. “Money, women’s money, was speaking,” Bren writes.
By 1958, 52 percent of stockholders were women, and the N.Y.S.E. finally took notice, commissioning a public service film called “The Lady and the Stock Exchange,” to teach the fairer sex about investing. Colleges such as Smith and Barnard — and even, eventually, the Harvard Business School — were turning out driven, educated women graduates, but most could get jobs only as secretaries or clerks.
Finally, Muriel “Mickie” Siebert, from Cleveland, came along. After more than a decade working at smaller firms, she became the first woman to buy a seat on the N.Y.S.E., in 1967, which allowed her to trade on the floor for clients of her eponymous brokerage firm. A good chunk of Bren’s book tracks Siebert’s pathbreaking career as it continued through the computer revolution and the Reagan years, the rise of debt and leveraged buyouts, and a surge of discrimination and sexual harassment lawsuits over pay disparities, physical assaults and hostile work environments that occasionally included strippers on trading floors.
“She-Wolves” is filled with intriguing anecdotes. Bren recounts how Ivan Boesky — the risk arbitrager who in the late 1980s pleaded guilty to insider trading and helped bring down the junk bond trader Michael Milken — hired a petite female trader with a penetrating voice named Doreen. Boesky sent her to work as his floor broker at the Chicago futures exchange, where, Bren writes, “being physically ‘pummeled’ was nothing out of the ordinary” and Doreen had to practically scream Boesky’s orders.
Wall Street generates wealth and influence, and supplies a disproportionate share of congressional candidates, U.S. treasury secretaries and C.E.O.s. It’s no wonder that women, and members of other underrepresented groups, have been clamoring to get in and be treated equitably. But these decades of struggle, exhaustively recounted in Bren’s book, have led to surprisingly meager progress.
As for why and what this all means, Bren has frustratingly little to say. Are certain kinds of people better suited to financial speculation? Does the financial industry’s homogeneity have anything to do with the cycle of bubbles, crashes and financial crises that have become a way of life? “She-Wolves” sidesteps these deeper questions. Bren’s only goal seems to be to remind us of a familiar fact: “Wall Street was built for men, and fundamentally, it remains an old boys’ club.”
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