‘Leaning in’ on Wall Street

As the chief executive of HSBC USA,Dorner,58,is one of the few women to have breached the upper levels of finance. But along the way,Dorner said,she didn’t push hard enough to change the “status quo” on male-dominated trading floors and executive suites. Rather,she said,she kept her head down,focusing on own career.

“The women at the top of organisations that I know will tell you that we think that we’ve made it because we were born the way we are and can play by these rules without feeling damaged by them,” Dorner said. “Or,we’ve learned how to play by these rules and use them to our own advantage.”

“I suspect that we were simply not very good role models,” she added. “And there aren’t enough of us to be visible so that people can work out how to do what we did.”

Dorner and her peers in the upper echelons—like Ruth Porat at Morgan Stanley,Joan S Solotar of the Blackstone Group,Edith W Cooper of Goldman Sachs and Cecelia Stewart of Citigroup—are the latest generation of women making it in a man’s world.

Isabel Benham,who started her career as a bond analyst in 1934,was so worried about being taken seriously that she initially signed her reports as ‘I Hamilton Benham’. When Muriel Siebert became the first woman to own a seat on the New York Exchange in 1967,the Big Board had only men’s bathrooms. “Not since I was a baby had so many people been so interested in my bathroom habits,” she declared in her memoir.

Dorner,who started her career in 1982 as an in-house lawyer at Midland Bank,recounted a gathering several years later at a bar with male colleagues,who she said made misogynistic comments. But,she said,she didn’t complain. “I have to say I had the most miserable day.”

The challenges are not unique to Wall Street. While women and men appear in the broad workforce in equal numbers,few women make it to the executive suite. And female chief executives like Indra K Nooyi of Pepsico,Ursula M Burns of Xerox and Marissa Mayer of Yahoo are even rarer.

Many companies are trying to close the gender gap. Big banks have created programmes to cultivate talented women. As a way to bolster the number of women with computer science and engineering degrees,non-profit groups are focusing on teaching high school girls to code. Norway requires 40 per cent of the board members of public companies to be women.

Sheryl K Sandberg,the chief operating officer of Facebook,has helped start a debate over the issue with her best-selling book Lean In. In it,Sandberg argues that women may be holding themselves back “by not raising our hands and by pulling back when we should be leaning in”. Her position has prompted an angry response from some,who say Sandberg is blaming the victim.

But Dorner,too,says women on Wall Street need to advocate more forcefully for themselves. In many cases,she says,the problem of the glass ceiling is matched by the “sticky floor”—that is,women who remain in lower-tier jobs because they don’t proactively try to climb the corporate ladder.

“Women do funny things,” Dorner said. “They do things like work very hard and expect to be noticed for it—it doesn’t work like that.”

Instead,Dorner argues that women need to take a page from their counterparts in pushing their own agenda and advancement. “I don’t think we need to suddenly be acting in a male way,” Dorner said,“but you can learn something from male behaviour.”

“If you offer a woman a professional opportunity or promotion—and I’ve had this happen to me—the first thing they do is produce a long list of pros and cons: ‘Oh,dear,what do I have to do with child care? I must and go tell my husband’,” she said. “If you offer it to a guy,he’ll just say: ‘Well,thank you very much’.”

Dorner wishes she had spoken up earlier. “I really do think the next push has got to come from the senior middle-management women who must stand up and be counted.”