Talk To Me

So I'm working on this series about leading women on wall street. A totally softball kind of interview. How did you get to your current position, challenges, journey, etc.Really easy, light stuff. I've been identifying various women in key jobs at many wall street and finance firms. Then sending out emails to their media contacts. Then I wait. Then I send out follow up emails. I can't believe how hard it is to find women that will talk to me.

Like I said - this is easy stuff. I'm not asking them about sex harassment or why their company is losing money. But these requests have gone to a black hole. No, this isn't a Forbes list, which my guess is that if it was I'd hear back from them. But really ladies. Nothing? Radio silence. Crickets chirping.

In my research, I found quite a few women are in leading jobs on Wall Street, but you wouldn't know it cause they are deathly afraid to talk to the media. I even reached out to a Women on Wall Street conference to try to join up with them to do a story. nada. zilch.

So if you think there aren't women in key jobs on wall street - you are wrong. Will you ever read about them? Probably not. Not unless its a Forbes list I guess.

They Are Executives - They Just Happen To Be Women Too.

With the departures of Carol Bartz as Yahoo! CEO and the loss of Sallie Krawcheck at Bank of America, I was asked to do a piece on women executives getting axed. Certainly there were plenty of those pieces out there. It was low hanging fruit. But I hated the idea of such a piece. Why can't they just be executives that got canned? Why did the focus have to be that they were women? I get that there are few women in that role. I have been trying like crazy this month to find a female CEO to interview and have been roundly rejected. But can't we move on and treat them like any other executive?That's what they are - they just also happen to be women.
Separately, I loved that carol said, "They fucked me." There was so much shock that she said that. Guess what guys, that's how we talk. I can't count how many times I've heard a female executive claim that at bonus time or say that when they were the only person to get laid off in a department. Yup, that's how we talk. She just had the  balls to say it.