Anne Tatlock will never forget her first business trip.
It was the mid-1960s, and Tatlock, then an asset manager for Smith Barney & Co (now Salomon Smith Barney), was heading into an all-male supper club in Minneapolis with a team of male colleagues to give a presentation to a client. But she was turned away, and only after some finagling by her boss was she whisked through the kitchen and smuggled into a private room for the meeting.
No one is slamming doors in Tatlock's face today. Since 1999, she has been chairman and chief executive of Fiduciary Trust International, a 700-employee global asset-management firm with more than US$50 billion in assets. It is unusual enough for a woman to run a large corporation, much less a Wall Street firm, but Fiduciary Trust stands out for more than just promoting Tatlock. In an industry overwhelmingly male and rife with accusations of sexism, it employs more women than men.
Fifty-one percent of the company's employees are women, and while that is about the same level as six years ago, the proportion of women in senior management positions has shot up to 30 percent from 6 percent and their representation on the board to 15 percent from 11 percent.
Those numbers may set Fiduciary Trust apart, but women are making inroads in the once all-male world of finance. A study last year by Catalyst, a New York group that does research on women's issues, found that women accounted for 11 percent of the corporate officers in the securities industry, up from 3 percent in 1996, for example, though their representations in top posts of the diversified financial industry, at 20 percent, and of savings institutions, at 22 percent, were little changed.
"Wall Street's glass ceiling is starting to crack," said Peggy Klaus, a consultant who coaches high-level women in the financial industry. "This is not the same industry as it was a few years ago."
Tatlock says Fiduciary, which was acquired last month by Franklin Resources, has achieved its high concentration of women not because of some concerted drive to recruit them but mostly because it has come to be regarded as an escape route from the sexist attitudes often found on Wall Street.
While some women have been climbing up the ladder, others say the old ways die hard.
Within the last two years, both Merrill Lynch and Citigroup's Salomon Smith Barney have settled class-action sexual-discrimination lawsuits with thousands of women at both companies. And this year, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission ruled that the investment bank Morgan Stanley Dean Witter fired a high-ranking sales representative, Allison Schieffelin, because she accused the company of sexual discrimination.
Klaus, the consultant, says more subtle forms of discrimination are widespread. She cites the experience of a woman client who is a high-level bond trader. "She was standing around one day and a male co-worker came up and complimented her on her pearl necklace and said he'd like to get his wife a similar one for their anniversary," Klaus said.
A moment later, Klaus says, another male colleague joined the pair, and the two men began to chat about business. "The only way they could relate to her was in a feminine way," she said. "When it came to business discussions, she was completely excluded."
H. Penny Knuff, a senior vice president who first joined Fiduciary Trust in 1994 as an assistant vice president and portfolio manager, had a similar awakening after she left in 1998 to join a Boston firm.
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