Sallie Krawcheck said she doesn’t believe Wall Street has improved its leadership structure much since the financial crisis. | Bridget Mulcahy/POLITICO POLITICO MONEY PODCAST Wall Street could get its #MeToo moment

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NEW YORK — Sallie Krawcheck has some ideas for why the testosterone-fueled world of Wall Street has not yet had a #MeToo moment.


It could be the multimillion-dollar settlements requiring that women don’t talk about sexual harassment allegations. Or the arbitration agreements requiring Wall Street workers to settle disputes in-house. Perhaps some of the worst abuses got drummed out in the 1980s. Or maybe there is a floodgate still waiting to open.

“We haven’t seen as much of it come forward out of Wall Street, and there are a bunch of hypotheses as to why,” Krawcheck, a former top executive at Citigroup and Bank of America and now CEO of women-centered investment platform Ellevest, said in the latest edition of the POLITICO Money podcast. “There have been more reporters who have called me and asked, ‘OK, who is the Harvey Weinstein of Wall Street?’ If I knew it, I’d tell you. It could be that we will have that moment, that someone’s been waiting.”

Krawcheck began her Wall Street career at Salomon Brothers before going on to become CEO of research firm Sanford C. Bernstein. She ran the brokerage firm Smith Barney and served as chief financial officer at Citigroup and later ran brokerage operations at Merrill Lynch after its acquisition by Bank of America during the financial crisis. Along the way, she says, she dealt with regular sexual harassment.

“It was bad,” she said. “I was young. I would show up every day and see Xeroxed copies of male genitalia on my desk. I’d lean over a desk and there would be laughter and somebody behind me pretending to perform a sex act.”

Krawcheck said she doesn’t believe Wall Street has improved its leadership structure much since the financial crisis. There are still no female CEOs of big Wall Street banks and few women in top leadership positions.

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“Post the financial crisis, you would have thought that diversity would have increased. After all, it was the white gentlemen who were in power when the financial crisis occurred,” she said. “Wouldn’t you want to try something different? No, the opposite occurred. The industry has been less diverse over the past few years than it was during the financial crisis.”

And she suggested that lack of diversity increases the risk of another financial crisis. “As a society, we have this perception that women are emotional,” she said. “The research, however, tells us that on trading floors that poor risk rises and falls with testosterone levels, and these trading floors are 85 percent, 90 percent male and these gentlemen tend under periods of stress to show off for each other. That’s dangerous.”

When launching Ellevest, Krawcheck said she had the difficulties of hiring financial advisers “man-splained” to her by a Silicon Valley venture capitalist.

“I’m like, ‘Dude, I’m sorry, I ran Smith Barney and Merrill Lynch. I’ve managed more financial advisers than anybody except maybe one person on the whole planet and actually did a pretty good job of it, and here you are instructing me on how to do it?’”

She said diversifying Wall Street’s senior ranks is not simply a matter of political correctness. “It’s not gender diversity for the sake of gender or diversity of skin color or educational background,” she said. “It’s really driving toward cognitive diversity. What you really want in a leadership team is not eight people who think exactly alike.”