Saturday, May 15, 2010
Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner tried to get things started with joke, at an event to celebrate the role of women in finance. He said, “What if Women Ran Wall Street?” Geithner continued, deadpan amid rising laughter, “Now that’s an excellent question, but it’s kind of low bar.”
It is noted that our world is the creation, almost exclusively, of men, not women. If we see there are only 3% of Fortune 500 companies have a woman as CEO and from Citigroup to Goldman Sachs, employs fewer than a handful of women in senior positions. Geithner’s joke was not extraordinary for Washington, in itself, where self-deprecating fare is the norm.
Sheila Bair, the chair of the FDIC (Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation)and one of the first federal regulators to publicly sound the alarm about the collapse three years ago. She sat next to SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission) chair Mary Schapiro, the first woman to hold that post and the deciding vote to initiate the agency’s recent lawsuit against Goldman Sachs. Elizabeth Warren, chair of the panel bird-dogging the TARP (Troubled Asset Relief Program) bank bailout and the chief advocate for new consumer-finance regulation that banks and their allies have spent millions to oppose.
All of a sudden something else became clear: they are telling Wall Street how to clean up its act, in this new era. All over the Washington: three SEC commissioners are women and the list goes on. Warren explains when asked what unites her with Schapiro and Bair, “Let’s face it, women in the financial-services industry are outsiders”. Bair agrees, “You see the world from a different point of view”.
