Sallie Krawcheck, founder and CEO of Ellevest, talks with women in Denver about her favorite subject: women and money. An honest disruption of money’s masculine gaming might be good for all of us. Relationships build trust, foundational for any economy, and females are good at relationships, she says.
A sweet little girl named Sallie Krawcheck grew up in the south, and expected to get married young, but a guidance counselor she calls “weird,” pulled her into his office and said, “Look at your SAT scores, Sallie; you can do something.” That changed her mind.
Sallie tells her story in a video here. She went north, and in 1987 landed a job at Solomon Brothers, investment bankers on Wall Street. She says: “Was I in for some culture shock! The entire culture was very masculine, very testosterone driven. Every morning I’d come into my office to find photocopies of—how shall I put it? Male parts. So I’d crumple them up and keep on. I thought, hold on, I’m going to make money, I’m going to make it here.”
By 1994, she’d earned a business degree from Columbia and had become an equities research analyst at Sanford Bernstein. Her reputation, when few analysts mentioned negatives, was for uncompromising truth. Fortune magazine put her on its cover with a headline: The Last Honest Analyst, adding this clincher: she made money for her clients.
In 2002, she was hired by Citigroup’s Smith Barney, and named by Time as a “Global Influential.” She was only 38. By 2007, just as a financial crisis was taking shape, she was named CEO of Citi’s wealth management business. She said things were scary in 2008, with the biggest banks facing meltdowns, but she really thought Citi should share some of the pain with their clients. She was promptly fired.
“For me, it wasn’t about the transactions. It was about the relationships. That’s very female,” she says, and since then has made waves based on her perception that gender has a lot to do with money. In 2013, she founded The Elevate Network and acquired 85 Broads, a global network that promotes women business leaders. The next year she founded Ellevest, a company committed to ending the gender investment gap. “As I’ve looked around for things that matter, this matters!” She’s emphatic about money’s power and the importance of ethics. Ellevest’s website and its online magazine is a networking treasure for entrepreneurs and change-makers..
This week she wrote an op-ed in Newsweek that says what Screwnomics is saying! Women need to talk frankly together about money! In a capitalist country, we’ll never see women shaping power until we start talking about the ways the macroeconomy and monetary policy discounts our lives. She writes:
“A drumbeat of messages…shift the blame for women's lower levels of wealth and greater incidence of poverty onto women themselves—and away from the systemic challenges we face. If we were just better with money….if we could just get that raise….[a] blame-shifting-masked-as-personal-empowerment approach.”
Sallie’s right. There are bigger systemic issues to change! Read more at the link below. Then get together with your girlfriends and Screwnomics!
