Something happens in the middle when women are in their 30s, and we can start with an array of things that happen, whether it is - you hope this doesn't exist any longer - but overt discrimination; whether it's subtle gender discrimination, which absolutely does exist among men and women; whether it's the fact that it gets hard to juggle at that point children, housework, etc. But people still have to go home and cook the dinner and clean the dishes and get the beds made and so on. And so, for a whole bunch of reasons, women tend to fall out in their 30s still today.
I can tell you that my experience has been that the gentlemen are more likely to come and ask for the order, ask for the raise, ask for the promotion, and that the women are less likely to do so.
Women tell us that they do feel patronized. They do feel like they don't have the time and the space to have their questions answered.
The truth is, if you are a woman saving 10% of your income for retirement, and you put it in the bank account, your chances of retiring well - living on 90% of your pre-retirement income for your full life - is 0%.
I had very good bosses, very good companies for which I worked. I worked in industries where the results really mattered; it wasn't the perception of results, it was just the facts.
You have six math Ph.D. Caucasian gentlemen from the Northeast of the country, great. You put one more in the mix, you haven't added much. It's only when you add something different that you really are able to accomplish more.
A computer can have so much more in its brain that a human can.
Your adrenaline starts to go when the market opens in the morning. It's like sports programming.
I was lucky. My children didn't have health issues, didn't have big school problems, etc. And as I watched some of my peers go through this, you can see how quickly a family can get derailed when they are not lucky.
If a woman waits 10 years to invest, "I'm busy", "I've got to do this", "I can put it off", "I gotta find the right financial..." It costs her $100 a day. $100 a day! And if we had money falling out of her pocketbook at the rate of $100 a day, we'd change our pocketbook; we'd fix our pocketbook.
Women have different characteristics and needs than men do.
The industry financial advisers, on average about 85% male, tends to be a more mature financial adviser - so I think in their 50s, really. For so many companies, in their 60s. In fact, there is one company that was telling me they had more financial advisers over the age of 80 than under the age of 30.
In our corporate culture, because someone may have to take some flexibility because of family issues, somehow we continue to believe they aren't fully dedicated.
How about mandated parental leave.? Oh, okay. Less than 20% of companies in America have it. Most of them think about it as an expense. What's the bigger expense? The bigger expense occurs if women have babies and don't come back to work.
When I started on Wall Street, there was pretty good diversity in those junior ranks. And you know what? It hasn't made it to the top.
Companies that put a mandated parental leave in place save money in the first year, FIRST YEAR. Because they don't have to hire to replace the woman.
Typically, when you ask a financial adviser sitting with a couple: Do you treat the man and woman differently? They say, "No!"
Fundraisers treat men completely differently than women. As a matter of fact, many of them have the default on their direct mail set up to read "Mister," and it really rankles a lot of women.
We don't recognize the power of compounding.
I want to buy a house. I want to retire well. I want to have baby.
Men tend to leave their financial adviser at a single-digit-percent rate in any given year. And women leave their husband and their joint financial adviser in the year after their spouse's death at a rate of greater than 70 percent - seven-zero.
What I saw a thousand times during the downturn was, 'We'd like to give her that opportunity, but we need to go with the sure thing - we can't afford diversity right now,'
