She-Wolves: The Untold History of Women on Wall Street

First came the secretaries from Brooklyn and Queensthe smart cookies who saw that making money, lots of it, might be within their grasp. Then came the first female Harvard Business School graduates, who were in for a rude awakening because an equal degree did not mean equal opportunity. But by the 1980s, as the market went into turbodrive, women were being plucked from elite campuses to feed the belly of a rapidly expanding beast, playing for high stakes in Wall Streets bad-boy culture by day and clubbing by night.

In She-Wolves, award-winning historian Paulina Bren tells the story of how women infiltrated Wall Street from the swinging sixties to 9/11starting at a time when No Ladies signs hung across the doors of its luncheon clubs and (more discretely) inside its brokerage houses and investment banks. If the wolves of Wall Street made a show of their ferocity, the she-wolves did so with subtlety and finesse. Research analysts signed their reports with genderless initials. Muriel Mickie Siebert, the first woman to buy a seat on the NYSE, threatened shed have port-a-potties delivered if the exchange didnt finally install a ladies room near the dining room. The infamous 1996 Boom-Boom Room class action lawsuit, filed by women at Smith Barney, pulled back the curtain on a bawdy subculture where unapologetic sexism and racism were the norm.

As engaging as it is enraging, She-Wolves is an illuminating deep dive into the collision of women, finance, and New York.