Wall Street Women

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Wall Street Women

Introduction

The book Wall Street Women is book talking about the first generation women who have been able to establish themselves as professional in Wall Street. It goes back to the 1960’s when women began their careers and were faced by blatant discrimination and challenges in their advancement, they created and formed formal and informal associations with an aim of bolstering each other’s careers. This historical ethnography by Melissa S. Fisher borrows from fieldwork, archival research and extensive interviews with successful women of the first generation in Wall Street. She goes on to describe their professional and political associations most common being the Women’s Campaign Fund and the Financial Women’s Association of New York which were groups formed to promote the election of pro-choice women.
Melissa S. Fisher charts the evolution of women’s careers and how they have grown both politically and economically. She looks at the changes in their perspectives and the cultural climate in Wall Street as well as the 2008 financial collapse. In Wall Street most of the pioneering subjects never participated in the women’s movement that had been happening in the 1960’s and 1970’s. She argues that these women did produce a “market feminism” which was in line with the liberal feminist ideas on meritocracy and gender equity with the logic of the market. This is a book that has been well researched and thoroughly documented and it’s a portrait of pioneer women by providing context for understanding the emergent discourse of feminizing markets.
Fisher saw an opportunity to carve out a niche within the academic literature to examine career movements and the underlying motivation for women in Wall Street. She began by interviewing a group of 20 women who were in senior level management in 1993. She went on to keep in touch with them to throughout the financial crisis and kept track of their careers and identified their frustrations and challenges as well as ultimately locating their trajectories within a cultural framework. The results of this research ended up in a book Wall Street Women.
Discussion
Wall Street Women looks into what it’s really like to make a career in the boardrooms of the incorrigible boys club of high finance. Fisher is a scholar at New York University in the department of Social and Cultural Analysis and traces fifty years of the personal and professional lives of the first generation women who make it as executives on Wall Street. The females in this book served in the top most units of major investment banks and brokerage firms as well as ran their own boutique management firms. She did a decade worth of research with interviews conducted in offices in London and New York. All this female professionals were picked from fundraisers and networks during events at the Upper East Side manses and they were followed up even after the financial crisis.
She displays how women who made it on Wall Street deftly deployed their supposedly innate risk-averse qualities to be able to stay at the top of their game. This means that women had to deploy their female innate qualities to be able to stay afloat for a long term. Since the 1990’s female executives have cast and portrayed themselves as prudent “mothers making family purchases” this is directly opposite to the hot-blooded male investors on Wall Street. These same traits that made these women would be “saviors of the economy”. According to Fisher this is a function strategy and not part of a biological function.
Some people believe that women are more conservative and risk-averse than their male counterparts. Some also believe that if women had filled more top leadership roles the financial crisis and recession would not have come out that way. They believe that things would have unfolded differently. According to Wall Street Women it shows like women have different intrinsic qualities and are capable of handling issues different. According to Fisher this is not purely biological rather its psychological aspect.
Its more on the socialization nature of women rather, women are brought up to inhabit and possess some of this characters and qualities. There could be a connection between being a woman and being risk-averse. The bottom line however is that it never about the women; it’s always about the powers that are in play. Systems of power play a big role in influencing socialization and how people run things. People need to realize that some of these ideas are culturally constructed and can be changed if people became more culturally conscious on issues being raised.
Wall Street Women does not reveal the names of the women or the names of their firms. However, the book does give us the pleasure of hearing conversations that take place behind closed doors in corporate boardrooms and offices. These women in Wall Street dish and talk about the guys in their offices and companies they really dish. The women in book share their fears on what men think of them and they are unnervingly nervous. One of the female executives is worried about the lay-off post crash due to the recession and is worried that she is becoming a “a bag lady”. This is a really odd concern by a multimillionaire. In the same scenario we get a younger employee who wants to take a maternity leave being told by her female boss “As far as I’m concerned, you have screwed up your job”.
There is an aspect of homo sociality in the book, where employers in most sectors tend to hire other who act and look like them. This only means one thing that even at that time fewer women got hired in Wall Street. This scenario has led to fewer women being promoted and moving up the ladder. One wonders if recognizing this as a phenomenon in the business world is going to help change things and if it’s an innate practice how can society help change it. Fisher shows us that is really hard to completely take over power over culture. Some of these practices are ingrained in peoples mind and they believe in them.
These are broader economic systems and it will require a large number of women in the sector to be able to pressure them to a point of rupture. To change some ideologies and stereotypes against women there is need for more women to rise and become professionals so that they can become part of the change mechanism. By rising and proving to the world that its possible for some belief systems to be brought down women will be able to influence some of the issues that are facing them. The groups of female executives in Wall Street Women are an example of what women can become when they believe in themselves and when they raise to the occasion and work towards empowering themselves. Women need to be their own champions when it comes to matters changing how society views them.
Having a few women at the top and running things does not change things. As seen in Wall Street Women things in the business world on matters involving women did not change much even when this few women worked their way to the top and ran successful businesses. Today the world hasn’t accepted the fact that women can take control of things and handle business well even when a few have risen to the occasion and done so. Some of the policies in the workplace do not accommodate women. However, there some policies being implemented for the good of women but when it comes to real practice the story is not the same. One example is with flexible time, men are not the ones who are supposed to take flex time. Even with some of these policies in place culture and cultural beliefs still come into play. Sometimes and actual shift may not take place because there is a stronger cultural hold that is informal and is prevailing over formal rule.
Most of the women in the book Wall Street Women started their business careers back in the early 1970’s and were beneficiaries of the post war affluence that democratized and reigned college enrollment. They were also boosted by the civil rights-era laws that banned hiring discrimination laws that mostly locked women out of the corporate and business world. Wall Street was becoming more diverse. Wall Street had become more meritocratic as well as relatively diverse with a great number of middle-class strivers without the luster of a distinguished family pedigree and joined investment banks and brokerage firms.
These women did not have MBA’s and insider connections, a common path that cut through the banking industry research divisions as well as back office support when they joined Wall Street. The brokers had all the unrepentant brashness and frat boy chumminess but they still went on and depended on number crunchers. When the deal making became more complex and harder the need for more research grew and became more important. Fisher says, “Joined investment bankers and traders in the ‘front office’”. These women had to go down on the ground to do the research on investment and study markets for themselves. They never allowed whatever they lacked disrupt them or make them miss in their goal to success.
For this women change came slowly, with time they learnt the ropes and got to know how to overcome challenges. Wall Street was not smooth sailing they had to stand and learn the trick behind all those deals and business transactions. Back in the 1970’s there were less than 100 professional women working on Wall Street. They had to negotiate work attire when there were no models that they could draw from and they had constant headaches for those who didn’t want to look like secretaries. Some of the female investors even donned suits and ties just like their men colleagues in the business. “I feel like I am Jane Goodall”, was marveled by one woman recalling the dynamics of a male-run board meeting.
The first professional group of women in Wall Street was the Financial Women’s Association was formed in 1956. By all accounts the women group was very conservative and in 1978 they voted against advocating the Equal Rights Amendment. They worked to advance themselves on Wall Street as they felt they couldn’t be overtly political. They became more relaxed in their fight for equality in the work place as well as the business world.
The Financial Women Association and an offshoot the Women’s Campaign Fund played a central and important role in another movement that funded an early generation of women politicians. By the 1990’s the group of female investors that Fisher was studying presented the first organized group of rich women who weren’t heiresses and widows. They had made their way to the top and on the way had made a lot of money to help the stay there. These women would go on to bankroll a new wave of pro-choice female candidates. They started influencing other sectors apart from the business world in Wall Street. In this part Fisher goes on to explain a little known bit of history. These women furthered the careers of women like the former Texas Governor Ann Richards as well as Senators Olympia Snowe a Republican from Maine and Barbara Boxer a Democrat from California.
Back then there was an advocacy for corporate diversity and affirmative action ideas that did not seem to sit well with the women in Wall Street in Fishers book. Congress had mandated a twelve week of unpaid maternity leave in the year 1993. One wonders now that they were the bosses in these companies, how generous should they be to younger women? “We expected so little in the way of a combination of work and family,” one of the women said. “ I was shocked at the entitlement of the younger women”.
By the time the bottom went down out of the market most of the female investors in Fishers book were coming into retirement. The financial recession did not only raise discomforting questions and it saw women both old and young get purged into Wall Street ranks. Currently the financial sector has the biggest gender gap wage compared to other profession. The statistics stand at 55¢ to 62¢ for every $1 made by men, compared to 77¢ on average. On their own many of the women regretted their laser like focus when it came to individual advancement and they sought to stay clear of what had happened. One of the female investors laments “Wall Street as a casino is not the Wall Street we all entered”.
Conclusion
The book shows the extent to which women think they are feminist. While there is a group of women out there who are marching in the streets championing for the rights of women, there others who have entered the Wall Street and been there for some decades and are working on enacting the feminism. Most of the women who were interviewed by Melissa Fisher for her book Wall Street Women show us a group of women who take the advocacy into a higher level and moved in to change things. Women not only need to advocate for their rights and what they belief but they also need to empower themselves, believe in themselves and work towards setting the pace.
Wall Street Women is a representation of what women can do when they believe in themselves. The women in this book came from different background and possessed diverse capabilities but their belief in success allowed them to enter what was believed to be a “male world” and take over by storm. Although they never got the chance to run and change things as they wished and believed, they got a chance to stand and represent women and show that it can be done. The women never had the pedigree qualities that some heiresses and widows of wealthy men in the business world but they have been able to take over and forge the way to their success as well as encourage others. If women can be able to support and empower each other as seen in the way this female executives supported the pro-life politicians there is a possibility that women will be able to bring the change they believe in. these women faced blatant discrimination and barriers to advancement, they created formal and informal associations to push and support each other’s careers.

Work Cited
Fisher, S. M. Wall Street Women. Duke University Press. 2012. Print.
Wall Street Women. Retrieved from: http://www.amazon.com/Wall-Street-Women-Melissa-Fisher/dp/0822353458.
Fisher, M. Wall Street Women. Retrieved from: http://www.dukeupress.edu/Assets/PubMaterials/978-0-8223-5345-4_601.pdf.
Analysis of Wall Street Women. Retrieved from: http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-07-26/book-review-wall-street-women-by-melissa-s-dot-fisher.
Melissa Fisher: Wall Street Woman. Retrieved from: http://www.nyu.edu/global/global-academic-centers/washington-dc/nyu-washington--dc-events/melissa-s-fisher-wall-street-women.html

Cited: Fisher, S. M. Wall Street Women. Duke University Press. 2012. Print. Wall Street Women. Retrieved from: http://www.amazon.com/Wall-Street-Women-Melissa-Fisher/dp/0822353458. Fisher, M. Wall Street Women. Retrieved from: http://www.dukeupress.edu/Assets/PubMaterials/978-0-8223-5345-4_601.pdf. Analysis of Wall Street Women. Retrieved from: http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-07-26/book-review-wall-street-women-by-melissa-s-dot-fisher. Melissa Fisher: Wall Street Woman. Retrieved from: http://www.nyu.edu/global/global-academic-centers/washington-dc/nyu-washington--dc-events/melissa-s-fisher-wall-street-women.html