“The NYSE named a woman as president. Thirty years ago, its lunch club didn’t have a ladies’ room.” – Headline from the May 22 Washington Post
It took 226 years, but Stacey Cunningham will soon take over as the first woman President of the New York Stock Exchange.
The lesson: get your foot in the door. Stacey started at the NYSE as a summer intern in 1994.
Things have changed slowly but surely at the venerable exchange. “When Cunningham started at the exchange it was overwhelmingly male. In fact, the women’s bathroom — a converted phone booth — was still in the members’ lunch club at the time,” reports NPR.
We wish Cunningham all the best! Women are still a small minority in the world of finance, even though research shows women often achieve better financial results, and clients and consumers want to be served by a more diverse workforce.
Read the story of Muriel Siebert, one of the first women pioneers in finance. She bought a seat on the NYSE, remaining the lone woman alongside 1,365 men for the next decade.
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