Mon, Jun 11, 2001 page19

• Escaping from sexist attitudes on Wall Street

  Not only is Fiduciary Trust International's staff more than 50 percent women, but 30 percent of the women are in senior management positions compared to 6 percent six year ago. That sets the company apart in the once all-male world of finance

  • By Melind Ligos / NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
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  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.

  

  Anne Tatlock, center, is chairman of Fiduciary Trust in Manhattan, where 51 percent of the 700 employees are women. She is with some of the women who hold 30 percent of the senior management positions.

  PHOTO: NY TIMES

  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.

  "I was sitting around a conference table with my male colleagues when it was announced that Carly Fiorina had been appointed to be the head of Hewlett-Packard," Knuff said.

  Her co-workers speculated whether Fiorina had a family and how she would be able to juggle her work and personal commitments.

  "I knew if her name had been Carl, we never would have been having this conversation," she said. Unhappy with the atmosphere there, she returned to Fiduciary Trust.

  Such occurrences are less likely at Fiduciary Trust, where having so many women at the top has created a "true meritocracy," according to Michael Magdol, Fiduciary Trust's vice chairman and chief financial officer. Magdol says Tatlock's emphasis on consensus contrasts with the authoritarian management style at many firms.

  Edwina Dean-McCrimmon, a business-development associate at the firm, said, "We're definitely very team-oriented, and I think that has something to do with all of the high-profile females around here."

  Fiduciary Trust earned its woman-friendly reputation long before Tatlock arrived in 1984.

  The company had a few women in key positions in the 1930s and 1940s, which was highly unusual," she said. "They paved the way for other women to get promoted."

  The number of women at Fiduciary Trust surged in the 1990s as a number of male portfolio managers retired and the company expanded overseas. "We had a lot of positions to fill," Tatlock said, and with huge numbers of women suddenly graduating from the nation's elite business schools, failing to tap into that talent pool "would have been an enormous mistake."

  So what advice do women give to other women who want to make it on Wall Street? "Find a company where someone has already set a tone for women to become leaders," said Katherine Tobin, senior director of research at Catalyst.

  Tatlock, the Fiduciary Trust chairman, is more blunt. "If you're at a firm that's not interested in creating a culture where you can grow, cut out of there fast," she said. "I always tell women: `Don't sit around and complain. Find a place that wants you.'"
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