In her new book “She-Wolves: The Untold History of Women on Wall Street,” historian Paulina Bren retells the history of American finance.
Long considered a boys club, Bren reframes the trading floors and barrooms of Wall Street as a place where women played a consequential role in shaping the best — and worst — of American financial culture.
The origins of the book came when Bren started listening to an oral history of the rise of Wall Street’s influence on American life between 1950 and 1980. The collection included 55 of what these historians considered to be the most influential figures in financial history. Fifty of those figures were men — which, Bren says, was disappointing but not surprising.
Bren joined The Show to talk about how what surprised her was what the men said in their interviews.
Full conversation
PAULINA BREN: When the men were asked in the interviews about women, sort of “where were the women, did you hire women,” they would say, “oh, there just weren’t women around, there just weren’t any qualified women.” And that’s just not true. There was so many women around, many of them highly qualified. They were learning on the job, just as the men were in those days.
SAM DINGMAN: Tell us what 1960s Wall Street was like.
BREN: It was completely different. It was almost a quaint little enclave, a quiet little enclave on the tip of Manhattan. Wall Street wasn’t really the kind of monkey-maker that it became in the 1980s. The telephone was the primary technology. To make a trade, there had to be something like 10 phone calls, at least. It was just so different.
As I described the printing shops, of course. You know, nobody had Xerox machines. There were printing shops everywhere, all over Wall Street, and they had rooms where you could have drinks for free, and there was a bowling alley in one place. It’s just a very different world, and these women are entering it, Wall Street, exactly as it’s starting to change. And then it just blows up in the 1980s and became sort of the epicenter of American values.
DINGMAN: Let’s talk a little bit about the women who laid the groundwork for that transition. Because to me, in a lot of ways, part of this book is about the cultural headwinds that women faced in two arenas, one of those being the academy, kind of like the Ivy League business school, hyper-professionally minded sort of person who gets interested in working on Wall Street. But then there are also secretaries and other women who, some of whom actually dropped out of college and didn’t have any formal academic training, but had a good set of instincts.
BREN: You have all these young, frankly kind of scrappy young women, most of them college dropouts, not all of them, but many of them college dropouts from the outer boroughs. So not from Manhattan coming to Wall Street, not wanting to be on Wall Street, but they come because the secretarial pool work pays a bit more on Wall Street. They sort of end up there, and some of them start to sort of look around, listen, learn, and they start to climb that ladder.
And at the same time, what you have in the 1960s is, I talk about the Harvard Business School. Harvard Business School let women in officially in 1963, the first eight women come to Harvard Business School for the full two-year MBA. They are rather tortured by the male classmates, who keep asking like, why are you here? Are you trying to find a husband? Because why else would you be there? And they don’t do as well coming out of business school, having an MBA from Harvard Business School. Turns out to be a worse pathway than being a secretary from Brooklyn.
DINGMAN: Isn’t that fascinating? And there’s another layer to that you get into that I think is extremely interesting, which is that most readers I think could probably predict. Not that it’s not interesting that there would be clashes between the men in the finance world and the women entering the finance world. But one of the things that you get into in the book is that there was actually a cultural clash between these two different groups of women in the finance world. The ones who came in through this academic track versus the ones who climbed their way up through the secretariat.
BREN: Another clash with these early pioneering women, and then the droves of women coming in in the early 1980s who are truly armed with Ivy League degrees and MBAs, and those things count at that point.
DINGMAN: We’ve already talked about so many of the incredibly complex degrees here, and we haven’t even talked about, you know, nobody in our conversation so far has executed a single trade.
BREN: Even as women, as these secretaries start to climb the ladder, the first place to go if you’re trying to climb that ladder, for the most part, is research analysis. It was nerdy, it was seen as feminized, therefore women were allowed in. And when you wrote these reports as a research analyst, you could sign off with initials. You didn’t have to put your full name. So that was a great place for women to hide. As the rising in the ranks and often men wouldn’t know for years that they’d been recommending stocks recommended by women. They still couldn’t trade. They still couldn’t trade, that was the big barrier ultimately.
DINGMAN: Right, this is also a broader portrait of just how twisted and warped Wall Street culture writ large is, and how, broadly speaking, resistant to change and transformation it’s been relative to other industries. Something I heard you say in an interview once, is you said to the effect of it you notice, there was never a “Me Too” reckoning on Wall Street.
BREN: You know, Wall Street is a very secretive place. Women will often not talk about what they experienced, so part of the challenge was also finding women who would talk. One of the things that the women said, especially from I’d say ‘60s and ‘70s, was that the worst was not the touching and the sort of, the unfairness of it all, but the fact that often, especially when they were finally in a position where they were brokers or traders, that often men wouldn’t speak to them.
In other words, this was their job. They needed to be in communication to make deals, and some men just wouldn’t talk to them. They’d have the clerks sort of be intermediaries, like it was a divorced couple that couldn’t talk to each other. And it’s really interesting because as I’m doing a lot of book events and so forth, I just did one last night, at UBS, at the bank, a huge turnout.
And what was great, it was a lot of young women, and I was chatting with some of them afterwards. I was signing books and I was asking them, of course, like how is the experience now. And indeed, so many of them said, “well, it’s improved, but just the other night I was at a business dinner, and I was the only woman at this enormous table, and it happens all the time.” Another one this morning prepping for another event, and again, a woman who’s 40, has two small kids, and she said that all of these issues that I talk about in the book, I mean, in a different fashion are certainly dilutive, but so much of that is still there.
