24 BARRON’S March9,2020
Mixed Progress
Among financial companies in the Russell 3000, banks have seen the largest increase in the past decade
in the share of women among the five highest-paid executives. There has been almost no change
in the asset-management industry.
30%
Banks-Diversified
Insurance-Diversified
Asset Management
25
20
15
10
5
0
2010 ’11 ’12 ’13 ’14 ’15 ’16 ’17 ’18 ’19
Source: Equilar
incoming class of new bank employ-
ees atCitigroup(ticker: C). “It’s really
the ability to attract the proper in-
bound talent and retain that talent, to
create role models and mentors to look
up to,” says Citi CEO Michael Corbat.
Three top Citi executives are on
our list.
Greater gender diversity is good for
men, too, not least because it tends to
result in better investment returns. In a
study of 3,000 companies globally,
Credit Suisse found that companies in
which women hold 25% of decision-
making roles generate 4% higher cash-
flow returns on investment than the
overall MSCI All Country World In-
dex. Where women accounted for half
of the senior managers, the companies
produced 10% higher cash-flow re-
turns on investment than the index.
T
he lack of racial and ethnic
diversity among women in
finance is even more glaring
than the gap in gender
diversity. According to McKinsey’s
2019 Women in the Workplace study,
conducted in partnership with
LeanIn.Org, women of color account
for a mere 5% of senior vice
presidents at financial companies in
the U.S. and Canada, and 4% of C-
suite occupants. White women, in
contrast, fill 21% of senior-vice-
president roles, and 18% of C-suite
jobs.
Goldman Sachs Group(GS) re-
cently said it won’t take companies
public as of June 30 unless they have
at least one diverse board director; the
bank plans to focus on women. The
numbers help to explain why. Compa-
nies with one diverse board member
saw a 44% increase in their share
price, on average, within a year of
going public, according to Goldman
research, while those with no board
diversity had only a 13% increase.
Says Alison Mass, one of our hon-
orees, who chairs Goldman’s invest-
ment-banking division: “This is a
business imperative, not diversity for
diversity’s sake....This isn’t just about
women. It’s about diversity of
thought, of background, of ethnicity,
of gender....We’re at a moment where
people recognize the business impera-
tive of diverse thinking.”
Our list includes numerous suc-
cessful women in asset management,
among them three of the four women
panelists on theBarron’sRoundtable:
Meryl Witmer of Eagle Capital Part-
ners; Rupal J. Bhansali, who oversees
international and global investing at
Ariel Investments; and Sonal Desai,
head of fixed-income investing at
Franklin Templeton, a unit ofFrank-
lin Resources(BEN). The fourth,
Goldman Sachs advisory director and
senior investment strategist Abby
Joseph Cohen, joins the list in recogni-
tion of her enduring influence and
pioneering career that paved the way
for other women to climb Wall Street’s
ranks in recent decades.
Also on the list are two (unrelated)
Johnsons—Abigail Johnson, CEO of
FMR, the parent of Fidelity, and Jenni-
fer Johnson, President and CEO of
Franklin Resources. Muriel Siebert,
the first woman to hold a seat on the
New York Stock Exchange, in 1967,
died in 2013, but she might have liked
that Stacey Cunningham, president of
the NYSE, and Adena Friedman, pres-
ident and CEO of Nasdaq, are on our
list.
In addition, you’ll find women like
Carla Harris, who have held promi-
nent roles in the private sector and the
public arena. Harris, vice chairman of
wealth management at Morgan Stan-
ley, chaired the National Women’s
Business Council during the Obama
administration. “I was very proud of
having gotten that appointment by
President Obama,” Harris says, add-
ing that she feels “very strongly that it
is your responsibility [to give back] at
every stage.”
We’ve also included women who
advocate tirelessly for investors, such
as Barbara Roper of the Consumer
Federation of America, and Suze Or-
man, an expert in personal finance.
And we’ve honored leaders in
environmental, social, and corporate
governance–focused investing, such
as Anne Simpson, director of board
governance and strategy at the Cali-
fornia Public Employees’ Retirement
System, the nation’s largest pension
fund, and Mindy Lubber, CEO and
president of the nonprofit Ceres. Both
are key architects of the influential
investor group Climate Action 100+,
which seeks to ensure that companies
disclose climate-change risk.
WhileBarron’sselection process
focused mainly on the professional
achievements of the women on our
list, we also learned much about their
outside interests through nomina-
tions and interviews. Not surpris-
ingly, in view of their own experi-
ences, many are active mentors of
other employees, and involved with
organizations that promote financial
literacy among young women and
encourage more women to seek ca-
reers in finance.
“I did not realize that my experience
of having intuitively understood money
from a very young age wasn’t the expe-
rience of other women out there,” says
Ariel’s Bhansali, who speaks fre-
quently at universities in the hope of
steering students to careers in finance.
“We all need to do more.”
Y
oudon’thavetogobackto
Hetty Green’s era to find a
time when women were rari-
ties on Wall Street—and of-
ten unwelcome, at that. Just a few
decades ago, it wasn’t unusual for
young women starting their careers to
be advised to remove their engage-
ment rings, to increase the likelihood
of a job offer. When Joyce Chang, the
chair of global research at J.P. Mor-
gan, started as a sovereign credit ana-
lyst in the 1980s, she says, “I’d see a
look of complete dismay from govern-
ment officials that they’d been sent
this young woman to write about
their country.”
And when BlackRock Vice Chair-
man Barbara Novick began her career
on Wall Street in the early 1980s,
prior to co-founding the firm in 1988,
“there were zero women who were
partners, managing directors, or prin-
cipals, and no role models to look at,”
she recalls. “It wasn’t uncommon to
be the only woman in the room.”
Novick, who played a critical role
in guiding BlackRock through the
post-financial-crisis regulatory envi-
ronment, recently announced that
she’ll be stepping down from her cur-
rent role, and will become a senior
advisor at the firm. She says she still
encounters bias, but that “my ap-
proach has always been to stay fo-
cused on results.”
That seems good advice in any in-
dustry, and especially pertinent to the
influential women on our list. After all,
that’s how they made it to the top.B
“I did not realize that my
experience of having intuitively
understood moneyfrom a very
young age wasn’t the experience
of other women out there. We all
need to do more.”Rupal J. Bhansali, Ariel Investments