Reasearch Report
I have decided to write my report on the female manager, identifying three women who are presidents or CEO’s of companies listed on the New York Stock Exchange, providing information on their background and how they made it to the top.
The first female I wanted to talk about is Muriel Siebert. She is currently CEO of Siebert Financial Corporation. She has had a chair on the National Women's Business Council and she made history as the first woman to buy a seat on the New York Stock Exchange in 1967. I hope she fits in the category, because I think this lady is wonderful. Muriel Siebert has been called "The First Woman of Finance." Among other firsts, she is the first woman to own a seat on the New York Stock Exchange and the first to head one of its member firms, Muriel Siebert & Co., Inc. She took a leave from her firm in 1977 to serve five years as the first woman Superintendent of Banking for the State of New York. She is known as an outspoken speaker who pulls no punches in lectures, panels and talk shows. She often exhorts industry to utilize women more aggressively. "American business will find that women executives can be a strong competitive weapon against Japan and Germany and other countries that still limit their executive talent pool to the male 50 percent of their population."
Muriel Siebert has advised, "The men of the top of industry and government should be more willing to risk sharing leadership with women and minority members who are not merely clones of their white male buddies. In these fast-changing times we need the different viewpoints and experiences, we need the enlarged talent bank. The real risk lies in continuing to do things the way they've always been done."
Muriel Siebert not only proves what she preaches, but she practices it too. Her best-known gamble made historic waves in 1967 when she applied to become the first woman member of the New York Stock Exchange. Although she had risen to a partnership in a leading Wall Street brokerage firm and had made big money for colleagues, her effort was patronized, ridiculed or openly opposed by many men on Wall Street. She was turned down by nine of the first ten men she asked to sponsor her application.
Before considering her for membership, the Stock Exchange imposed a new condition: she needed a letter from a bank saying they would lend her $300,000 of the near-record $445,000 seat price.
To begin with, there are many events in United States history that have shaped our general understanding of women’s involvement in economics, politics, the debates of gender and sexuality, and so forth. Women for many centuries have not been seen as a significant part of history, however under thorough analyzation of certain events, there are many women and woman-based events responsible for the progressiveness we experience in our daily lives as men, women, children, and individuals altogether. Many of these events aid people today to reflect on the treatment of current individuals today and to raise awareness to significant issues that were not resolved or acknowledged in the past.
...iscusses that the price of a seat on the New York Stock Exchange was abnormally low. The sources discusses how the stock prices were rising dramatically and since the stock prices were rising , seat prices should have risen up during the boom of 1929. Instead, there was a negative correlation between stock prices and seat prices of approximately 20 percent, months before the crash. I like how this source is implementing the statistics of stocks of the New York Stock Exchange because it demonstrates one of the causes of the 1929 collapse. Brokers have anticipated the October 1929 crash, but the public heard no mention of it because brokers thought they can liquidate shares to save the market from collapsing.
Cleopatra the Seventh, born in 69 BC (69- 30 BC) and Wu Zetian, born in 624 in Wenshui County, (624-705) were both women who ruled over the Egyptian and Tang Dynasties respectively. They ruled over their empires a time when women were not supposed to rule unless they did so by their husbands. Both were great leaders who seized the moment and eventually rose to power. They were intelligent and made unique achievements that improved the prosperity of their regions. The following paper compares their rise to power, leadership styles, and accomplishments and provides lessons to today’s women in business
James, Edward T., et al ed. Notable Women. Volume I. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press.
Smuts, Robert W. Women and Work in America. New York: Columbia University Press, 1959. Print.
In February 2015, Ellen Pao’s lawsuit against Kleiner Perkins, a venture capital firm, for gender discrimination went on trial. Pao alleged that she had been treated unfairly by her ex-bosses and passed on numerous times for promotion in favor of her male counterparts. While Pao did not win her lawsuit, the trial brought back to light the problem of gender discrimination and of the glass ceiling in corporate America. Since women started to enter the workforce, there always have been barriers and obstacles that prevented them from reaching the higher ranks on the corporate ladder. Public recognition that there was indeed a problem of discrimination helped giving women assurance
v. Virginia case, she also fought for pay discrimination against women in the Ledbetter v. Goodyear. Ginsburg was able to become a professor at Rutgers University Law School and at Columbia, where she became the schools first female tenured professor. In 2007 when Lilly Ledbetter, a manager at a Goodyear, found out that she was being payed less than her male colleagues in the same position. “Ginsburg’s dissenting opinion spurred Congress to act when the court said workers can't claim their current paychecks are affected by discrimination that occurred years earlier”(Stohr, 2015). Ginsburg believed that law should not be involved in any way to your gender. She believed that equal rights were things that people were just entitled to have as human beings. This began a reoccurring and continuing fight against payment discrimination that we can still see in present-day America. Although she was mainly known for working for gender inequality, she also helped create changes in state voting
Barbara White, author of Women’s Career Development, gives an opportunity for successful women to give advice to other women wanting to pursue a career in the workforce. First, they explained that women need to be single-minded today. They must make their own choices and know what they want. If a woman hopes to achieve her goal of an ‘American Dream’ and live up to it, then she should be persistent and keep working at achieving her objectives. The best advice given in White’s book is that a woman should not underestimate herself (227-229). A woman today can be whatever she pleases. It takes work, dedication and persistence to achieve goals in general, not just in the career aspect of life. As seen through Joan Crawford and Dawn Steel’s stories, a ‘business woman’ has a bright future now and for years to come. Women’s roles have drastically changed throughout the past century along with the actual number of women now working. It is phenomenal to see such an increase in women’s participation, and hopefully this course will continue even higher into the twenty-first century.
The once male dominated, corporate, "white collar" America has seen a phenomenal influx of women within the last thirty years. Although a female lawyer, physician, or CEO is no longer considered a rarity in our times, women still face quite a deal of oppression in comparison to their male counterparts. In retrospect, some professions have always been controlled by women, and men have not made a noticeable advance in these fields. In 1970, finding a female lawyer to represent you would be a difficult task, since less than five percent of the profession were women. Today, that number has risen to almost thirty percent. The percentage of female doctors has almost tripled in the course of thirty years. African Americans have not made such a conspicuous progression within the last fifty years, while women have made a tremendous impact on the corporate world. One may wonder, how did women make these extraordinary advances? For the most part, it is due to the education they receive. At the present time young girls are encouraged to enroll in classes dealing with math and science, rather than home economics and typing. As pointed out by Nanette Asimov, in her essay "Fewer Teen Girls Enrolling in Technology Classes", school officials are advocating the necessity of advanced placement, and honor classes for teenage girls, in both the arts and sciences. This support and reassurance than carries over onto college, and finds a permanent fixture in a woman’s life. While women are continuing their success in once exclusively male oriented professions, they are still lacking the respect and equality from their peers, coworkers, and society. The average male lawyer, and doctor make twenty-five percent more money than their female equivalent. Women have always lived with the reputation of being intellectually inferior to, and physically submissive to men. This medieval, ignorant notion is far fetched from the truth. In 1999, high school men and women posted similar SAT scores, being separated by a only a few points. In addition to posting similar scores on the SAT, the average males score was a mere two-tenths of a point higher than an average females score on the ACT. Even though a woman maybe as qualified as a male for a certain occupation , women receive unwanted harassment, and are under strict scrutiny. A good illustration of this would be the women represented in "Two Women Cadets Leave the Citadel.
Gender bias is very common in the corporate world. Throughout history, males have been dominant in the workforce, whereas women have been excluded. Currently, only 4.6 percent of the Fortune 500 CEOs are women. In Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, women rarely even work outside of the house. In this novel, Harper Lee shows the differences between the roles of males and females, specifically the distinctions between occupations and social values in the 1930s.
Frier, Sarah, and Carol Hymowitz. "Women CFOs Reach Record Level in U.S. as Top Job Remains Elusive." Bloomberg.com. Bloomberg, 5 Feb. 2013. Web. 18 May 2014. .
During the 1920s, approximately 20 million Americans took advantage of post-war prosperity by purchasing shares of stock in various securities exchanges. When the stock market crashed in 1929, the fortunes of many investors were lost. In addition, banks lost great sums of money in the Crash because they had invested heavily in the markets. When people feared their banks might not be able to pay back the money that depositors had in their accounts, a “run” on the banking system caused many bank failures. After the crash, public confidence in the market and the economy fell sharply. In response, Congress held hearings to identify the problems and look for solutions; the answer was found in the new SEC. The Commission was established in 1934 to enforce new securities laws that were passed with the Securities Act of 1933 and the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. The two new laws stated that “Companies publicly offering securities must tell the public the truth about their businesses, the securities they are selling and the risks involved in the investing.” Secondly, “People who sell and trade securities must treat investors fairly and honestly, putting investors’ interests first.”2
Today, women are entering the leadership sphere, which is mainly occupied by men. Many women leaders believe that people perform best when they feel good about themselves and their work. An effective leader creates results, reaches goals and deadlines, and quickly recognizes vision and objectives with high level of quality and productivity. To accomplish these, a leader should have special qualities like able to motivate others, specific and technical skill set, clear sense of purpose, mission, clear goals, focus and commitment. Over the years, women have proven themselves to be successful leaders as men. For instance, Oprah Winfrey, one of the most successful and famous African-American women in history to have made a huge impact and difference
Today , we can find a great number of business women, who have made their mark in the society by
Women leaders have the crucial soft skills of empathy, innovation, facilitation, and active listening (Masaoka, 2006). They also have first-hand life experiences that bring technical skills and experiences from the street level to the workplace (Masoka, 2006). Women often build stronger relationships with clients and outside contacts than their male counterparts. This relationship building skill, provides a key aspect which helps to move businesses forward (Giber et al., 2009). Fortune 500 companies with a high percentage of women significantly outperformed those with fewer women. Companies with the highest representation of women showed higher returns on equity than those with fewer women employees (Giber et al., 2009). Thus, future organizations may have a higher percentage of female leaders than we have experienced in the past. Future leaders must ensure that there is equality among the workforce and that women are accurately represented among the