Female pillars of Wall Street establishment

David Nason

Little known in their home country, four Aussie women have cracked the glass ceiling on Wall Street, reports David Nason.

WALL Street high-flyer Sara McKerihan remembers clearly the day in London many years ago when she fronted her boss at merchant banking firm Salomon Brothers and complained: “It’s not fair, I have to be twice as good.”

The boss fired back: “Well, it’s just as well you are then, isn’t it?” McKerihan, an Australian, went away and laughed about the exchange.  Then she went back to working twice as hard as those around her.

“You know, it’s no different to being an athlete,” McKerihan said this week. “If you want to win, you’ve got to train harder than the next guy.” Today, McKerihan is a managing director and co-head of global client management at the world’s biggest bank, Citigroup, where her role includes supervising the bulging hedge fund business.

She will be in Australia next week for the Advance 100 conference at the Sydney Opera House. Co-sponsored by The Australian, it will bring together many of the nation’s finest expatriate high achievers: men and women who have excelled in business, finance, law, academia and the arts.

Accompanying McKerihan from the cut-throat world of Wall Street high finance will be three other women little known in their home country: Josephine Linden of Goldman Sachs, Jennifer Nason of JP Morgan and Ros Coffey of Lehman Brothers.

All took different paths to Wall Street but their achievements in the world’s toughest, most ruthless financial environment stamp them as extraordinary. Their success suggests that the diversity programs put into play widely last decade to eliminate the “glass ceiling” (the term invented 20 years ago to describe the invisible barriers preventing women advancing to senior levels of the corporate world) have actually worked.

Yet the opinions of these four highly successful Australian executives on the state of the glass ceiling in 2006 are surprisingly mixed and sometimes sharply at odds, as are their views on what women must do and understand to get to the top.

Statistics on women in senior positions in corporate America are hardly flattering. At Fortune 500 companies, there are just 10 female chief executives, women fill only 16 per cent of corporate officer jobs and 15 per cent of board directorships.

In California, the world’s eighth-largest economy and a trailblazer in social trends, women hold just 10.2 per cent of all executive officer positions and board positions at the state’s 400 largest public companies.

Nevertheless, Linden, a Wall Street veteran and mother of three, who is global head of private wealth management at Goldman Sachs, believes that “meritocracy is recognised” in today’s workplace and that women no longer need to learn “tricks” to get ahead.

What they do need, Linden says, are networks for women to support each other in the workplace and access to mentoring programs. These, she says, are “incredibly important” for the advancement of women.

She applauds Goldman Sachs for putting great effort into these areas, particularly with younger women who, courtesy of another 1990s glass-ceiling strategy, have been entering the banking and financial markets industry in roughly equal numbers to men. But McKerihan, whose career has taken her from Australia to London, Hong Kong and New York, wonders if the much-feted mentoring programs are worth it.

“The society here (Wall Street) is very politically correct and we are very conscious of mentoring and helping women,” she says.
“But I would challenge that by saying maybe we are being too gentle. “The trading floor is a very tough environment and I’m glad I came into the industry when, in a sense, you were swept around a bit. It made you learn.”

McKerihan has seen diversity issues tackled in different ways in the four countries she has worked and says there are no easy answers. “Do I think the financial markets and banking world is still hard for women? Yes, definitely,” she says.

Nason — who has managed to combine four children under the age of 15 with a career that has taken her to global head of technology, media and telecoms investment banking at JP Morgan — believes the scarcity of female senior executives will not be solved at entry level. “The idea that you recruit equal numbers of male and female MBAs and you’ll eventually get 50:50 men and women in senior positions is a strategy that has clearly failed,” she says.

“The issue is retention. Too many women are leaving because there isn’t a compelling enough reason for them to stay. “They are not getting the opportunities to say `yes, this is worthwhile for me’.” Nason says the solution is in the hands of male senior executives who should be prepared to gamble on women the same way they do on men.

“Men are often promoted before their time so they can grow into a position,” she says. “But with women it’s different. The prospect of having a woman fail in a promotion is so uncomfortable that they don’t get promoted until they’re certain the woman will succeed.”

Nason says women need to see women at the next level above. If they don’t, it can suck the inspiration from them. “Women need to know it’s possible,” she says. “I actually believe women would stay in droves and readily combine work and family if they were given the same opportunities as men.”

McKerihan agrees. “People want to see women succeed so much they’re now afraid of having them fail,” she says. “It’s counter-intuitive. Go back 10 years or 20 years and women weren’t getting the jobs because people were uncomfortable with the idea. Now it’s the reverse.”

McKerihan says part of the problem, relates to identifying why a woman has failed: has she failed because she wasn’t good enough, or has she failed because she wasn’t given enough inclusion? Coffey, who at 38 is a senior vice-president at Lehman Brothers and global human resources director for five of the bank’s divisions, believes doors do open for women who work hard and who think strategically.

“You also need access to the right client accounts and, when the good work comes in, to make sure people know you want to be involved,” she says. But the “good work” and the “right client accounts” are not necessarily in areas that earn the firm the most money. They are often accounts that are unusual, where the firm breaks new ground in some way. It can also be about turning around a previously difficult client relationship.

“Sometimes sitting back and resting on the laurels of established projects is seen as easy,” Coffey says. “But if you can develop something or change something, turn it into something it wasn’t, you are going to be more noticed.”

Coffey makes no apology for emphasising the visibility aspect. “I think Australians generally and women in particular are used to growing up in a society where you don’t really toot your own horn much,” she says. “But here you’ve got to overcome that natural reticence and celebrate your own achievements a little bit.”

Disclosure: Jennifer Nason is the writer’s sister.

By David Nason, The Weekend Australian,  December 16, 2006.