What Wall Street’s women pioneers had to put up with

“Wall Street" was still centered around actual Wall Street, a compact area with not only the major firms—JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, Bear Stearns—but also many smaller brokerage houses. A veritable army of female secretaries, teletypists and data-entry clerks would pour out of the subways in the early morning, daring to enter this male bastion in heels and skirt. Those who started to climb the ladder usually found their foothold in the smaller firms. They put up with a lot, none of it subtle, all of it exacerbated by the two-martini lunch.

To Bernadette Murphy, coming from the nautically tinged neighborhood of City Island in the Bronx, Wall Street’s harbor salt air smelled like home. Yet working as an assistant in a trading department in the late ‘50s, taking trade orders and writing letters for her firm’s partners, she also was in hostile territory.

She found herself fending off men in the office who offered her trips to Paris or a new wardrobe in return for sexual favors. Her response, repeated by countless women across hundreds of offices for decades, before sexual harassment was a definable legal infraction: “Don’t be silly! What would your wife say?"

Women on Wall Street had to have a thick skin and perseverance to navigate past the wrong kind of attention while vying for the right kind. But if you had all that, you could perhaps get somewhere.

Beth Dater certainly did. A Boston University graduate turned Pan Am flight attendant, she married a pilot in the late ‘60s who asked her to stop flying. A temp agency sent her first to pass out chocolate-cherry bonbons in a parking lot dressed up as Miss Mon Cheri, and then to the offices of Lehman Brothers CEO Robert “Bobbie" Lehman to pick up the phones. Like so many early women of Wall Street, she got her start answering the phones—watching, listening and learning. Before long, she was auditioning at Fiduciary Trust Company as a research analyst-in-training.

Female research analysts led the way up the ladder because, not needing to be visible, they could hide behind initials that effectively rendered them men, or at least genderless. In 1970, when Wall Street was put on notice about its hiring practices at New York City’s Human Rights Commission hearings, only Merrill Lynch was able to boast that as many as seven of its 26 industry specialists were women. But as one of them, Mary Wrenn, noted: “For a long time, those who read my reports didn’t know whether I was Miss or Mr. Wrenn."

Mary Farrell came to Wall Street the next year, having answered an ad for a securities analyst trainee at Pershing & Co.—mistaking it for a theater-related job because of the firm’s Broadway address. She was hired because the director there boasted that he’d figured out that hiring women was a way to snag inexpensive talent.

Later, at Smith Barney, she went to report an incident in an elevator—an executive had pushed her up against the wall and groped her—and found the director of HR crying because something similar had happened to her that same day. When Mary returned to the office on Monday, the HR director was gone, but she’d left a parting gift on Mary’s desk: a list of the salaries in her department. Mary learned she was being paid exactly half of what the lowest paid male analyst was making.

To some women, even half of a male Wall Street salary seemed like good pay; it was more in actual dollars than most women in America were making.

But it enraged Muriel “Mickie" Siebert, an early pioneer who arrived in New York in a broken-down Studebaker in 1954 and catapulted ahead as a successful airline industry analyst. She also knew that trading—entirely off limits to women—was where the real money was.

Frustrated that she couldn’t sit at the big table making the big deals at a major firm (she was told she’d still have to sit with the typists), a friend suggested she buy her own seat on the New York Stock Exchange.

It turned out the NYSE constitution did not bar women (the founders hadn’t had the foresight!). Hurdles were plentiful anyway, but on Dec. 28, 1967, Siebert became the first female NYSE member. It had cost her close to half a million dollars for a white metal badge with the number 2646 embossed in red. She referred to it as “the most expensive piece of jewelry going."

Still, to avoid conflicts, she promised not to set foot on the floor: She would use an independent, “two-dollar" male floor broker as her proxy.

Almost a decade later in 1976, Alice Jarcho became the first woman to actually trade on the floor, and she encountered what Siebert feared. Jarcho wasn’t ready for the lewd remarks, the dildoes sent down the pneumatic tubes, the anonymous threatening calls that led to a temporary police escort.

But by 1980, when Jarcho left the NYSE floor to become the number two on the Shearson American Express institutional trading desk, a seismic shift on Wall Street and on college campuses was about to take place. Women in business schools were now becoming commonplace, a leap forward from 1963, when the first class of eight female students arrived at Harvard Business School only to be interrogated by the men about why they were taking the place of legitimate breadwinners.

Female graduates from the Ivy Leagues and graduate business schools started to pour in like a gold rush. Beth Dater, always elegantly attired, rolled her eyes at these newcomers in their sneakers and suits, their office heels tucked away in a monogrammed Lands’ End canvas tote. But even she started to feel a tad insecure that unlike them, she did not possess an MBA.

The fact was that the difficult pathway Dater and her cohort had taken—many of them college dropouts and all overcoming obstacles to turn support roles into steppingstones—was fast closing. The new Wall Street woman belonged to an entirely different universe.

But did she penetrate the all-boys’ club any better than her predecessors? It was telling that in the insider trading scandals of the late 1980s, which resulted in Michael Milken and Ivan Boesky and others serving time, not one woman was indicted. This wasn’t a badge of integrity; it was a sign that women did not yet fully belong.

Yet belonging was vital. In the 1990s, on the notorious Bear Stearns trading floor, Maureen Sherry, a Cornell University graduate who’d benefited from a boss with a busy social schedule who’d sent her to meetings in his stead, watched (and laughed) as inflatable sex dolls flew through the air, men punching at them to keep them aloft.

When she and other top-level Bear Stearns women had had enough, they started meeting to share information, as well as to get the lowdown on the current predators, and eventually agreed to call out the worst of whatever they experienced. But their efforts largely proved futile because after all these years, they were suddenly drawing a line in the sand that hadn’t been there before. Their male colleagues were confused: If a sexual innuendo was fine yesterday, why not today?

In recent decades, women have certainly dealt themselves into the Wall Street game, thrived and had fun doing it, but they haven’t gotten as far as they’d expected. In 2022, women held only 12% of the managing director posts and 16% of principal and partner positions at private-equity firms. Perhaps it’s finally time to rewrite that playbook.

Paulina Bren, a historian and professor at Vassar College, is the author of “She-Wolves: The Untold History of Women on Wall Street" published on Sept. 17 by Norton, from which this essay is adapted.