By Paulina Bren
In September 1970, the New York City Commission on Human Rights held a series of hearings on sex discrimination in the workplace. In his opening remarks, Mayor Lindsay spoke of “a total environment of inequality in which half the population is systematically denied rights and opportunities taken for granted by the other half, and in which the community’s desperate need for the fullest use of all its human resources is foolishly sacrificed in the name of custom.” Anthropologist Margaret Mead — who recalled how she’d marched alongside her suffragist mother and as a child believed anti-suffragists were “wicked, rich women with poodle dogs” — testified about these “customs” that kept women locked out of the workplace or else in low-paying positions. She argued that societies had always been geared toward women making babies and men providing for them, but there was no longer a need for an expanded population,
quite the opposite, and yet society remained mired in the “customs” of a time that had outlived its purpose.
When a representative for Merrill Lynch testified, he was asked about the low female enrollment in the firm’s broker trainee program. His answer was that there were few female applicants and “even fewer of those who can qualify with the combination of finance education, and/or financial sales experience.” When challenged — there were countless women working in business, he was told, and so “Why wouldn’t more of these women . . . be inclined to come over and apply for your program?” — he replied: “I don’t really have an answer to it except that the net effect is that they do not.” He further defended his position by insisting that women were not allowed to work as brokers on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange or the American Stock Exchange because there it “would become an occupational disability to be female.” (It was pointed out to him that if women were actually barred from trading on the NYSE or Amex floor, given equal rights legislation passed in the 1960s, that would be illegal. Moreover, he had clearly never heard of Muriel Siebert.)
At the hearings, women recounted their experiences of how they’d received training and promotions reluctantly, if at all. To be considered for the Registered Representative examination, they needed a sponsor, and while their firm might even offer their sponsorship — especially to “ambitious secretaries or sales assistants” — it then refused to give them the title or the income of a broker, even as they were now licensed and making trades for the company.
The Bankers Trust revealed at the hearings that while 54 percent of its employees were women, only 1.5 percent occupied what might be considered top jobs, meaning non-support staff jobs, and no women at all were executives. Merrill Lynch had 40 percent female employees, but only 2 out of 70 were officers; and while they had 499 brokers, only 15 were women: there were no female traders. Its Research Department had an impressive 7 women out of 26 industry specialists, but as Mary Wrenn, one of those seven, explained: “Financial analysis is probably the one area where women are equal to men because we don’t deal directly with them. For a long time, those who read my reports didn’t know whether I was Miss or Mr. Wrenn.”
In December 1970, three months after the New York City Human Rights Commission hearings, the NYSE finally let women back on the floor . . . as pages.
Back at the Harvard Business School, Robin Wigger, class of 1970, wrote to the women in the next incoming class with some tips on how to survive their HBS experience. First, have a well-rehearsed answer to the inevitable question: “What’s a nice girl like you doing in business school?” The men, especially the first-years, believed that women were only there to find themselves “rich husbands.”
There’d been one significant change since Priscilla and Lillian had graduated the year before; Robin Wigger was one of four women who’d participated in the “Experimental Residence Project,” which had her living on the Harvard Business School campus so the administration
could gauge “whether there were any major problems for the women living in the men’s dorms,” or if they might suffer from “a possible loss of our (feminine) identity.” There were not, and they did not, and now in her letter to the incoming female students, Wigger strongly advised them to take up the offer to live among the men in accommodations that “are far superior to the Radcliffe Graduate Center.”
Two years later, in a 1972 editorial in the Harbus News, the student paper for HBS, Ilene Lang wrote on the “progress” achieved in the MBA program: “Now several years and two lavatories in Aldrich later, we notice that the old stereotypes have hardly budged. HBS clings to its old attitudes about women. . . .” These attitudes she laid out as incredulity (“What are you doing here?”); condescension (“I don’t care if my wife works — I want her to — but I want my dinner ready at six, and of course, she’ll stay home and take care of my children.”); and derision (“I’m a male chauvinist pig, always have been and guess I always will be . . . and that’s that.”)
The daily reminders of a woman’s place did not stop there. There were the jokes: “about women’s work, women’s liberation, and women’s physical, mental, and emotional frailties.” Those who wrote the WACs, the real-world business case studies, referred to women work-
ers as girls; the name tags and name cards handed out by the school — that Lillian Hobson, too, was given on her first day; a rectangular piece of white cardboard, eighteen inches by four, with her name printed in black — included the title of Miss or Mrs., thereby distinguishing “the available bodies from the unavailable ones.”
Excerpted from She Wolves: The Untold History of Women on Wall Street by Paulina Bren. Copyright © 2024 by Paulina Bren. Used with permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.