Members from the buyside, sellside-broker and financial IT community gathered last night to paytribute to the women who lead in the financial services arena in Traders’ Magazine’s 4th annual Wall Street Women awards ceremony.
Held at the New York Hilton Midtown, more than 150 guests gathered to celebrate the winners of the 2014 Wall Street Women as they accepted their awards. Honorees flew in from Ohio and California and one winner sent a proxy to accept her award due to her job duties in London.
Trish Regan, news anchor and host of Bloomberg TVs Street Smart with Trish Regan, addressed the achievements that women have made in financial diversity as well as the challenges that still remain.When she was young, growing up in New Hampshire, her father gave her a T-shirt that said Anything buys can do, girls can better. And she took it to heart.
Regan went to Columbia and studied History and Economics.Before she graduated, she started to go on interviews at financial companies such as Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley. In the interviews, she looked around and saw that she was the only women among the candidates. And she realized financed was a male-dominated profession.
She went to work on Wall Street and found herself working in groups largely made up of men. And, as she looked around, there werent a lot of girls on the floor.
The Bloomberg TV host later had an opportunity to move into journalism. It was around the year 2000 and it was an exciting time in finance and an exciting time to be reporting on the business. She joined Market Watch.And, there too, she noticed that there were few women in the workplace. She often found herself the only women in editorial meetings.
There are still a lot of men in the business, but media is getting better, according to Regan.
At Bloomberg, there are several women in key managerial positions, she told the Wall Street Women audience. She added that we see women in top spots at Facebook (Sheryl Sandberg, COO) and Yahoo (Marissa Mayer, CEO).
But, by her estimation, only about 4 to 5 percent or corporate CEOs are women.
Remembering Ken Heath
Last nights Wall Street Women event also paid tribute to Kenneth Heath, the longtime publisher of Traders magazine who passed away from a long illness this week. The producers of the Traders Wall Street Women event were scheduled to honor its publisher of the past 20 years with an award for his wife and two daughters. His daughter Cheryl, a UBS veteran, spoke movingly about her fathers commitment to inspiring his two daughters to pursue their dreams. She thanked the audience for the honor and remarked that her late father would have loved this event.
The evening included loud cheers for the Wall Street winners who accepted their awards, with some of the loudest cheers for Mary Clark, senior vice president of WallachBeth Securities, who received an award for Equities Trader.
The 2014 Wall Street Women event was sponsored by Bloomberg, Bloomberg Tradebook, ITG, Jane Street and ConvergEx.
