Other People’s Money: Anne Clarke Wolff on the Wages of Sexism

the term actually used on the Solomon Trading floor. His big Swinging Dick, Lewis describes from the inside his rake's progress through the fabulous palace of greed, ambition and folly that was Solomon Brothers in the nineteen eighties. This is a born storyteller, blah blah blah, A storytelling asset. Yeah, how about that, a story telling asset who, for the rest of his career will be known mainly as the guy who coined the phrase big swinging dick, which I

didn't even do. But there was some truth in that phrase because it's Solomon Brothers. Anatomy was destiny. The sexism there was from another age. Even at the time it shocked me. I mean For example, it was fairly common for strippers to turn up on the trading floor and get up on one of the guy's desks and take off all their clothes, and no one thought that was weird. They thought it was just like what happens on a

trading floor. But that kind of stuff maybe wasn't as important as the message that women got, the message that they were, in the end, not all that valuable. Bonds, bonds and more bonds. Anyone who did not want to trade them for a living wanted to sell them. This group now included several women who had initially hoped to

trade at Solomon Brothers traded women's soul. No one ever questioned the Solomon ordering of the sexes, but the immediate consequence of the prohibition of women in trading was clear to all. It kept women farther from power. It turns out that one of my mentors at Solomon Brothers was a woman. She's who kind of plucked me from the training program and found me a place on the trading floor. Her name was Leslie Christian, and we had a kind of running conversation about what it was like for her

in this guy's place. Her voice was somewhere in the back of my head when I was writing the book, how do you think Liar's Poker would have been different if I had been a woman? Oh, my gosh, she would have had I can only speak for myself. I don't think it would have been as I don't. I'm not saying it was easy for you to write the book. I don't think I could have been that balanced. And I what I mean, as you there's an element of or a flavor of you're you know, you're sort of

in it. You're kind of in there, You're in it, but not of it, and it's kind of funny, and it's kind of shocking. I think women um feel it deeper. There were times when I was sobbing, Or was the time I went to a lawyer and said, can I do something about this? You know I was treated poorly. I wasn't treated poorly like harassment or anything. I wasn't I didn't get an assignment I wanted, and and then that constantly having to be on alert, to be professional

and to be taken seriously. I don't think I could not have written that book, No way. I didn't have that same I didn't have the same exposure either. I mean, I think guys talk differently when they're not around women. So you felt left out of some of the conversation. Oh sure, I know I was left out. I mean that's one of my things I laugh about now, is I really had no idea they were arranging prostitutes for clients or buying drugs for clients. I really I had.

That was completely off my radar. So in a funny way, the firm was less visible to you than it was to me. You think a woman wouldn't have had the visibility into the firm, That's right. Yeah, Leslie actually left Solomon Brothers around the time I did. She's now a senior investment advisor at something called north Star Asset Management,

which is a firm that does socially responsible investing. I guess we'd both like to think that things had gotten better for women on Wall Street since the nineteen eighties, and you know, obviously, from a distance it looks like they have. But in this episode, we're going to ask have they actually gotten better? I'm Michael Lewis and welcome back to Other People's Money, a companion podcast to Liar's Poker.

This is episode three, Fast and loose in the golden years, I find myself still wanting to know what Wall Street looks like through the eyes of a woman, not just back then when I was there, but now. So I called up a woman named Anne Clark Wolf. She's had an incredibly successful run on Wall Street. She became the chairman of Bank of America's Corporate and Investment banking division.

American Banker has called her one of the most powerful women to watch on Wall Street, and just recently she announced that she was leaving big banks to start her own investment bank, which she calls Independence Point Advisors, and has said that it will be made up of at least seventy percent women and people of color, which is to say, no more than thirty percent white men. And the firm already has a nickname. How did you get the nickname? Solomon Sisters? I just loved the pun of

Solomon's Sisters versus Solomon Brothers. One reason loves the pun is that she actually was in the training program of Solomon Brothers three years after me. Her experience of that was different in one important way. She was reading Liars Poker. I read it in the training program at Solomon Brothers.

One mimiographed page at a time. So when we started in the training program in August of eighty nine, and we were the class who was hired after the crash of eighty seven, so we were a very small class, but literally a page of your book would work its way down the aisle every day. So the book came out October of eighty nine, so you must have been the tail end. It must have been the tail end of your training class. And so was it a mimiograph

of from the actual book. I don't know whether someone got their hands on it or whether it would just look like photocopied pages to me, but I distinctly remember reading it that way, which is a pretty disconnected way to read a book. So that's why I enjoyed actually going back and reading it like a real book. But it shows you how it really resonated with people and

was clearly part of the culture. Well, one of the reasons I suspect you were reading a mimeograph copy is John Goodfriend told the whole firm that they weren't allowed to buy it, so that if you wanted to read it, photocopy it. So the training program, do you remember that now that you say, though and do you I mean, since we're on this, what did you make of it

at the time? So it's interesting. At the time, I think it was a It was a celebration of some of the great qualities of Solomon, and I think it was also clear that there were some elements that were probably slight exaggerations just to make the characters more interesting. Do you think that the people sitting in your training class passing mimeograph pages of Liars Poker to each other would have did they recognize the training class? I described? Oh, totally, totally.

The training class descriptions were incredibly accurate. The back row set the tone of the class because the back row acted throughout as one indivisible, incredibly noisy unit. The back row people moved in herds for safety and for comfort, from the training class in the morning in early afternoon, to the trading floor at the end of the day, to the surf club at night, and back to the training program the next morning. They were united by their

likes as well as their dislikes. They rewarded the speakers of whom they approved by standing and doing the wave across the back of the class, and they approved wholeheartedly of the man at the front of the room. Now the speaker paused, as if lost in thought, which was unlikely, you know. He finally said, you think you're hot shit, but when you start out on the trading floor, you're going to be at the bottom. The notion again of who sat on the front row, who sat on the

back crow. It's actually kind of stunning when I reread it to think that. And it wasn't like it was set up that way. It wasn't like when you walked in the first day somebody said, you folks, you sit there because you fit the stereotype. But it's that seemed to just have a life of its own that perpetuated itself. Where did you sit middle I was neither. So back up for me a little bit and just tell me how you ended up applying for Wall Street jobs in the first place, Like, how did you get the bug

to work on Wall Street? I had been in economics and English major and undergrad. I liked the intersection of writing and data, and what I loved was that Wall Street was a way to experience what you were reading about on the cover of the Wall Street Journal. It's somehow brought deals and the news to life. In a way that you were getting a front row seat of how those transactions came together. And I still think that that's frankly what captivates me still today, thirty two years later.

It's an amazing opportunity to work with companies at an interesting moment in time on something that is a really big deal to them. And when you so you were hired by solom bresent, you were hired into the investment banking department, And I'm curious, like what it felt like then to be a woman coming into this place. I had lots of women friends who would fill my ears with what had happened to them, But I'm curious, like

what your experience was. I had a phenomenal experience because the men who I worked with and for treated me like I was one of the guys, and I never felt a gender difference. In my case. Part of that was I was virtually married by the time I started at Solomon, so I was probably not the most interesting

prospect of the women in my class. But I think as we a number of us are still close friends, and we've actually had reunions of our class over the years, and the women have all agreed that they felt like it was a very equal opportunity place. Ultimately, the men just wanted who were the best and the brightest, and

did you help them get the job done. Part of why I'm building what I'm building today is I think it's actually far worse today than it was in nineteen ninety because in nineteen ninety it truly was just about capitalism, and it was a young person's business. And if the men who I worked with and for saw that I had anything to add to a deal team or that

I had a talent, they were all in. So if you'd have told me that the woman who was going to create a women's centric investment bank in two and twenty one was going to come along with the narrative that Solomon Brothers in nineteen eighty was a kind of golden age compared to now, you would not have expected that.

Which for Solomon Brothers for a golden age for women, I'd have said my head would be spinning, like like how So I want to talk a little bit about what why you think it might have been better for women in Solomon Brothers in nineteen eighty nine than it is for women now in a big Wall Street bank. I think for women in particular, there were a couple of themes. I noticed the first outflow of women in

the mid nineties. So as the private equity industry and the hudge fund industry started to take off, candidly, a lot of women who had married or were dating men in those industries just said it was no longer worth the aggravation, the aggravation of dating them, or an aggravation of going to work, the aggravation of trying to be a working spouse with them, when you know when your partner, frankly had an incredible amount of money or an incredible

amount of upside in their role. So there were definitely a decision by a generation of women to decide to stay at home, which again very admirable that they were. They were willing to do it and able to do it, but it basically left a huge hole generationally in people who were kind of poised to be ready than when the street took off. God, that's interesting. So there's like a generation of women who were put out of business

basically by more successful men in the same business. People want to believe that women exit because the job has long hours or is difficult. When you interview women, they never say that. They in fact say, I can respect the fact that it's difficult they leave because of the lack of inclusion. So at the end of the day, some of what I describe as the camaraderie and the inclusion that happened at Solomon where you were part of the team, you were part of the family. Women were

included in the NCAA pool at Solomon. You know, that was like an incredible fun alleying moment where people would trade shares on different teams in the NCAA. So once you lost that camaraderie and what pulled people together, I think it was ultimately the inclusion led a number of people to say that they kind of checked out, and they, interestingly almost all continue to work. They just worked in a different capacity, whether they went in house or whether

they went on to different variations of the field. So why were women excluded? If Solomon Brothers was a kind of golden age of including women in things, and I would actually kind of dispute that on the trading floor, but I know what you're saying. It was so kind of rough and tumble, and then if you were good at your job, it's sort of and you were willing to maybe ignore this comment or that comment. You moved

up in the firm. Well, by the way, I was six months pregnant when I made managing director at Solomon, So maybe people thought it was cute to have this large pregnant woman in the picture with Derek Mahan and others when they promoted me. But I thought that that was an interesting moment that where everybody would have stereotypically said, of course, you could never get promoted when you were pregnant. I think that they enjoyed the fact that they were

able to prove that wrong. But describe for me the exclusion that happens after Solomon Brothers. As time was on. You're saying you kind of see women having a harder time being included. How does it? What form does the exclusion take. I'd love to be able to put a pen in exactly what it is. But you know, I think the other variable I would call out is in nineteen ninety even an investment banking at Solomon, I would guess probably at least forty percent of the men had

working spouses. That was not true, and certainly in my last two big jobs. And if you have a working spouse or increasingly if you have a working daughter. I think it completely changes the mindset the number of times in the past five to ten years where I see a man proudly say I'm sponsoring her, I have her back. I'm not going to put up with somebody cutting her out of a deal or taking a key account away

from her that has gone to the wayside. I mean, I could name for you four or five men at Solomon who all thought that they had the fingerprints on my success, and all did have their fingerprints on my success. I couldn't name five people now who are as deliberate and viewing it as their role in really helping women continue to thrive and get those opportunities, get the most

important accounts, get put on the most important deals. You know, It's interesting the point you made about how you can't really look you look across the street and you can't really see very many examples of the kind of men who had their fingerprints on your career at Solomon Brothers. That there isn't that kind of personal relationship between senior men and younger women. And I'm wondering if part of the problem is that we're in a culture where those

relationships are more dangerous. It's a huge issue. I think, I listen, I think, whether it's real or implied. I mean, I have had a number of people site the Pence rule that amazes me. I didn't even know there was a Pence rule, except he had that weird rule himself.

People refer to it openly and commonly as a very clear indicator of feeling like either that they can't be in certain settings with women on their team, or certainly would never would be very uncomfortable, you would not have dinner alone with a woman on your team, which again I just I would not have thought twice about it myself. And you think about where the great mentoring often happens, or where the war stories happen, or were you really feel like you develop that trust with somebody who you

can ask all of those questions. It typically does happen either when you're flying somewhere together, or you're having dinner with somebody, or in those other social settings. The conditions where a woman, a young woman would build a professional relationship with an older important man happen to be the same conditions where the older man might suggest an inappropriate relationship. And so you've got this problem where the older man doesn't want to be in a position where he might

be accused of having suggested an inappropriate relationship. But part of me wonders if what's going on is all of this is being used as an excuse. That's sort of like men now have an excuse not to make much effort with women. I think you're spot on, by the way. I would also argue that the more the diversity became the purview of hr d EI executives and other people's jobs, it became incredibly convenient for the men to opt out.

You know, they would be forced to sit through the diversity training and they would they would do the other check the box exercises, but it became really somebody else's job, and not a high paying or high status job. No. Well, I have to tell you one of my favorite Solomon bosses, who's now the CEO of a company. We were talking about how he resisted the pressure to hire a d EI officer and he said, I'm the DI officer, And

I said, damn it, you're right. And the problem is we need more CEOs to think they really are the DI officers. The funny way of dealing with the marginalized population is to marginalize the whole subject the role. Yeah right, we're going to take a break here, other people's money will be right back. I'm back with investment Banker and Clark Wolf. I want to get dig into the motives of and also I won't want you to explain the

business you've created. It's now been got the nickname Solomon's Sisters. What is this business? Well, and I was very clear to not name it Solomon's Sisters. It was really it was really a running joke as I was reaching out to friends and people who I trusted in thinking about where I could still have an impact on the industry.

And I took the view that I had thirty two years across the three biggest firms between Solomon up through Citygroup for twenty years, two years at JP Morgan, and then almost ten years a Bank of America, that despite where I felt like I had put a lot of effort in pulling through diverse candidates, I still looked around and I said that I thought that I was leaving the industry with a different composition and complexion than I

would have hoped. And I do believe in the power of cognitive diversity that if you can combine a bunch of different minds, different histories, different backgrounds. I actually do believe it leads to better advice. So the premise was diverse people had to be exceptional to survive on Wall Street. They probably didn't get the best clients to cover or

the easiest tasks or opportunities. So if I can curate a group of those exceptional people who just happened to be diverse and not lead with diversity, can I change the client experience? You know, the industry certainly would say that the numbers are different than what I'm representing at a macro, but a lot of that progress has not

really translated per se into investment banking. And there's actually been research that shows good academic research that shows that women running each eight accounts manage them more sensibly than men running each trade accounts. And there's no research on the other side saying actually, men are better at this.

So it is very peculiar that, given that we're supposed to be an efficient, free market economy in Wall Street is supposed to be like a meritocracy, that there hasn't been a drive to actually replace the men with the women because the women might actually naturally be better suited to it. I like to bring it back to the ski industry because I love skiing, and so when people show up at a ski resort and they need to be put into their ski class, women will say on

a scale of one to ten, there are four. The man will say that he's an eight, and they're both sixes. And so I think, and that story has also played out in job qualifications, and I think an interesting modern word for it. And I still experience this. I have

probably four hours a day of impostor syndrome. The data is super clear, though, I mean it's you know, you can find the data on qualifications for jobs between men and women, so it's I do think that if you take that data, it makes me hopeful that as I build a firm and you have women and minorities with that mindset of always having been the underdog and always airing on the side of underrepresenting what their capabilities are, I hope that that's exactly the kind of advice a

CEO would want. Do you think that part of the problem is that people who are delegating the risk taking decisions, the ultimate holders of capital who are giving their money to a hedge fund or a private equity fund, or buying shares in Goldman sacks so they can trade whatever it is that those people are deceived by confidence that in fact, the best way to get ahold of other people's money, to whip it and drive it and swing it around in the markets, is to pretend, let you

know a lot more than you do, and that the problem is ultimately that the holders of capital are bad judges of who's good at managing the capital. I don't know how you're ever going to undo the natural gravitational force that tends to reward people who may be confident at the expense of being capable, right. I mean one way of viewing it, and one way everybody will view it is the role of women in finance is as

a massive social injustice. But there's another way of viewing it is like a massive market inefficiency, Like the money is being invested stupider because women are not equally involved in the investment decisions. And you put it like that, and the reply might come from the opposition that there's no way the markets would allow that kind of any market would allow that kind of inefficiency. But that's not true.

Look at the CEO of Carlisle has recently said that the cost of capital that they allocate to their portfolio companies that have diverse teams in a diverse board is different. Their financial results were twelve percent better with their diverse portfolio teams. Diversity pays, Diversity pays, and eliminating mail over confidence yes, pays two. So given all of that, you candidly wonder why we haven't seen more progress since even if people just put their capitalist hat on, they'd be

making more money. But at the end of the day, until a head trader is told he will make five hundred thousand dollars more if he has a woman, a black man, a Latin x an LBGTQ leader in his ranks, and he will lose five hundred thousand if that person leaves because they weren't ultimately feeling supported. You just don't have the incentives that have really met people at the place where they really understand the most, which is ultimately

around around capitalism. They all know and feel bad about the lack of representation and sales and trading, but feeling bad just hasn't translated into the day and day out behavior. That's just going to be key to really making it attractive and interesting and compelling for a woman to want to be in that seat. I want to thank Ann Clark Woolf for trying to figure out what's going on with women on Wall Street and trying to tell us how it really is. And go check out our firm,

Solomon Sisters. I mean Independence Point if you're so inclined other people's money is a production of Pushkin Industries. If you like the show, please remember to share, rate and review. You don't like it, don't say anything. You can buy our new Liars Poker audiobook, unabridged and read by me the author at Pushkin dot Fm, Slash Liars Poker, and also at Audible Define more Pushkin podcasts, listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Coming up in the next episode. What it's like to reencounter your earlier work. I mean, it's funny listening back. It really sheds a lot of light on conversations that

I had with my parents. They were hearing the work I was doing and telling me that I should go to medical school, and I remember at the time feeling like, well, you are very not supportive of my dream, you know, And but now, like you're listening back, I realized, like, oh wait, no, they just heard the evidence in front of their ears of like, oh this isn't good, Like this isn't good. What you're making ire a glass and I try to make sense of our earlier selves and

the work we created. I guess I haven't wondering did you ever play Liars Poker or see people play? That's a good question. I did not play Liars Poker. I am about the worst gambler on the face of the planet, and I certainly would not have had John Mary, there's poker face to pull off a game of Liar's Poker. You just did a very female thing, right, you just said You just said that. The guys don't say I'm the worst gambler on the on the face of the

Wall Street guys don't anyways. Also, why women wouldn't play Liar's Poker and lose a lot of money either, Right, that's right, that's right.