This year, for example, Citigroup said its female employees earned 29 percent less than men in similar positions.

“We have a lot of work to do,” Ms. Cohen said of both Wall Street as a whole and of her employer, Goldman Sachs. “And we know we’re not going fast enough.”

To create change, longstanding diversity and mentoring programs do not go far enough, Ms. Krawcheck said. Closing the gender gap will require change from the top.

But both Ms. Krawcheck and Ms. Cohen encouraged women to speak more openly about their financial goals and ambitions.

Ms. Cohen encouraged women not to be afraid to talk about money with their supervisors. Employees who talk more often about compensation when discussing performance and setting their goals are more likely to get raises, she said.

In Ms. Krawcheck’s Wall Street days, those groups often split along gender fault lines.

“All the guys would come and tell me how much more money they wanted to make all the time,” she said. “And all the women didn’t, because they were afraid to. So it was easy to fall into ‘the squeaky wheel gets the grease.’”

As important as it is to change the conversation around money, it is equally important to control the money. In Silicon Valley, where female start-up founders received only about 2 percent of venture-capital money last year, Goldman Sachs is working with women to help them make appeals to rooms that are generally dominated by men, Ms. Cohen said.