Change is Hard, Let’s Go Blogging?

I know the rules for writing a catchy post about gender diversity in finance. I’m supposed to present a problem: “Women own only X% of the stock market!” and then present a solution: “That’s why we’re launching Maid Marian Trading!” The problem is not supposed to be anyone’s fault. The solution is supposed to be a win-win that leverages rather than upsets existing paradigms. And the tagline is supposed to be cute, like “Tell him you’ve gone shopping — for ETFs 😉”

That would be “thought leadership.” It’s supposed to be effective because it meets people where they are and gives them something positive to do. Those are both good things! But there is something about thought leadership as commonly practiced today that makes it woefully inadequate as a paradigm for addressing serious problems. Anand Giridharadas expresses this eloquently in his recent book, “Winners Take All”, where he argues that the requirement to come up with solutions as soon as we point out problems, especially solutions that are a “win-win,” prevents us from truly grappling with systemic issues.

These two things are tied together — the “win-win” and the quick jump from the problem to the supposed solution. If we don’t spend any real time sitting with a problem, we won’t be willing to make any sacrifices to solve it. “But hey, that’s fine!” thought leadership says. “You don’t need to be convinced the problem is important if the solution is a win-win!”

This is a trap. Not everything can be solved with win-win solutions. And some things are worth losing for.

So we’re going to get to some positive things you can do to facilitate gender diversity in finance. But first, we’re going to sit with the problem. Longer than you probably want to.

Recently I was sitting at a finance conference and looking around the room. Less than 5% of the speakers were women, and the audience proportions weren’t much better. Despite having spent a couple of decades now in male-dominated spaces, I still feel proportions this low in a crowd this large as vaguely unsettling. Everyone is very nice to me. No one remarks on the imbalance.

I have been sitting with this problem for a long time. Sitting in this problem, more accurately, since the eighth grade, when the advanced math class split from the regular math class. Suddenly, there were very few women in the room. This was not a consistent feature across the honors track. There was a better balance in honors English, honors history, etc. Fourteen-year-old me did ask the obvious question: where did all the women go in math? But no answer was forthcoming, and I didn’t really care. Math was fine and all, but I was going to be a novelist anyway. To be honest, I didn’t mind the attention that came with being one of the exceptions to the supposed rule that men were better at math. I was comfortable being one of the guys. Most of my friends were guys anyway — the guys I played in band with, the guys on the debate team. It was a small school, and I knew everyone. People were just people.

So it seemed like a weird aberration when a high school math teacher began singling me out. “Bishop, take this to the office and make me 100 copies,” he’d often say. Something I never saw him send anyone else to do. “Bishop could probably get a job as a mathematician, for women the bar is pretty low. But I still have high hopes for her. She could make someone a fine housewife some day.” [Spoiler alert: he was pretty wrong on that last part!] I don’t remember being outspoken in his class. It’s possible I was, but I don’t think so. I didn’t have the perspective on it that I do today, and I was just a kid who desperately wanted everyone to like me. I do remember the pit in my stomach walking into his classroom every day. And I remember feeling determined.

There was an entire quarter where I never missed a single question. I said nothing about it, and neither did he. But he could probably tell I was focused and pissed. He gave me a 99 out of 100. “Only Jesus is perfect,” he announced to the class, not looking at me as he returned our quarter’s grades. “So I don’t give 100s.”

The next quarter he developed a “theory,” which he proudly explained to the class. “You see, women are good at homework, because they work hard. But men are better at tests. There’s a big test coming up soon, and I’m betting on Tucker to beat Bishop.”

Lee Tucker is a fantastic human being and dear friend. But for about two months, I dedicated every fiber of my being to taking him down. I knew it was a trap: if I got beat, it “proved” the theory. If I won, I was just an “exception” again. There’s never any way to disprove such theories.

I did the most that I had the power to do, and got a perfect score on the test. My math teacher simply declined to announce the results.

Sitting in this problem was not something I enjoyed, and I planned to get out. So when my freshman year advisor suggested I take calculus in my first semester at college to get my math requirement out of the way, I frowned. “Calculus is boring.” I said. “What are the other choices?” He shrugged. We both walked over to the math department’s advising table to find out.

That’s where I met a mathematician for the first time. And I’m incredibly lucky that it was Jordan Ellenberg.

“I don’t want to take calculus,” I told Jordan. “What else you got?”

“Why don’t you want to take calculus?” he asked me.

“It’s fine, I guess.” I said. “But I find it boring.”

“So you’d be willing to take something harder than calculus, as long as it’s interesting?”

“Sure,” I said.

“Take my number theory course,” he suggested. “It has no prerequisites, and I promise I’ll try to keep it interesting.”

“Ok,” I shrugged. Sounded kind of lame to me (how much theory of numbers can there really be?), but he seemed nice and no-nonsense, so I thought it was worth a try.

It turns out there is a *lot* of theory of numbers! And some of it I really like! Later when I grappled with the decision to switch my major from English to math, Jordan gave me some excellent advice. “If you study writing,” he reasoned, “you’ll be able to write about all the same things that other writers write about. If you study math, you’ll be one of a very small number of writers who can write about math. Writing is a great thing to come back to after you’ve developed a deep expertise in something else.”

Majoring in math was mostly great. I made some life-long friends, advanced my problem-solving skills, and learned to have patience with hard things.

During my senior year, I was assigned as one of the graders for a freshman math course. I introduced myself to the professor and asked him how he wanted us to divide the work. He looked at me a bit confused. “You’re my grader?” “Yes.” “Huh. You’re sure you’re assigned to this class?” “Yes, they assigned two of us, to share the load. I’m one of them. I don’t know where the other one is.” He frowned. “Ok,” he said. “I’ll email you.”

Weeks went by. The first homework was collected. The first homework was graded. I didn’t get any emails. Maybe he had the other grader do the first homework and I would do the second, I thought. I went back to the class and introduced myself again. “Just wanted to follow up,” I said. “I’ve been assigned as a grader for this course. You said you’d email me, but I never got an email.” He nodded. “Nothing to do right now,” he said, “I’ll email you.”

The second homework was collected. About a week later, a grad student knocked on my door. He was holding a stack of problem sets. “I’m the other grader,” he said. “I can’t get these done on time on my own, I have a deadline for another class.”

“It’s fine,” I said, taking the problem sets. “I’m supposed to be helping. I’ve been asking the professor how I should help, and he just keeps saying he’ll email me.”

The grad student looked at me awkwardly. “You can’t tell him you’re doing this,” he said. “He says you can’t grade because you’re not qualified.”

I could feel my face turning red. “It’s a freshman course,” I said slowly. “I’m a senior. Does he just not accept undergraduate graders? He could tell them to only assign grad students.”

The grad student was silent for a moment. “It isn’t that,” he said.

My face got hotter. “Oh,” I said.

“I don’t think you’re unqualified,” he said sheepishly. “I just need you to grade these, and give them back to me. And then I’ll give them back to the professor.”

I nodded. “Ok. I’ll let you know when they’re done.”

For the rest of the semester, I secretly did a job I was openly paid to do. It was humiliating.

At that point, I still believed experiences like this were an aberration. I assumed I was mostly insulated by the respect of my male peers and the quality of my work. It got harder to maintain those beliefs as I finished my PhD and went on the academic job market. One department chair called me to ask solely about my partner’s prospects for finding employment in his city. I was not invited for an interview there. Another university made me a tenure-track offer, and I asked them if the salary was the same for all of the junior candidates they were making offers to. They said yes. But when they mailed me the official offer letter — it had a higher salary, and a different name. Turns out they accidentally mailed me the offer letter for a junior male candidate.

I desperately wanted to extricate myself from this problem. I wanted to be judged solely on the quality of my scientific work. Early in my academic career, I would argue with older female colleagues about the form of their entreaties for more representation at prestigious events like invited talks. “I would love to see more women be recognized,” I would say. “But if we make it an explicit criterion, we will undermine the credibility of any women who are chosen.” This, unfortunately, remains very true. But what my older colleagues countered also remains true: “If we don’t force it as an explicit goal, we will see no real progress.”

You don’t understand what you don’t understand, one of them told me.

I understand it viscerally now. You can’t opt out of the way the world perceives you. You can have mostly male friends and walk in mostly male spaces, and you can imagine that your gender is an incidental condition that has nothing to do with your career. But that is not a thing that you get to decide. The world has ways of reminding you exactly what it thinks of women.

There’s no trigger warning here, because I’m not going to make you sit with me through the worse things. There are some limits to what I’ll put in a blog post. What happened to me is nothing special — nothing that hasn’t happened to millions of other people (most of them women). But in the relative peace of my life, it looms large enough to separate time into a before and an after.

Before — time was linear, and the pieces fit together solidly. After — time sometimes feels like it is pulling apart at the seams. It curves in on itself, with tentacles of the past tugging rudely on the present. Time doesn’t create distance any more, it only creates layers.

Let’s skip ahead to the after.

It’s 2016 and I am on the subway. A drunk guy is loudly threatening a stranger who bumped into him. The drunk guy’s girlfriend tries to calm him down. “He didn’t mean it,” she says, so plaintively that it breaks my heart.

It’s 2019 and I am watching a talk given by a man and woman team. The man is speaking most of the time. He keeps interrupting his partner, even when she is talking about her own experiences. The audience is nodding at his pearls of wisdom. They are laughing at his jokes. The sound is cloying to my ears. Suddenly the lights are too BRIGHT and the air is too THIN and my fingers start to shake just a little.

I excuse myself and go to the bathroom. A woman in her early 20s is washing her hands. “Isn’t this so interesting?” she says to me. “He is so smart! They are like the coolest power couple.” I stare at her blankly.

You don’t understand what you don’t understand.

It’s 2020 and we’re walking home from dinner. Out of the corner of my eye, I catch a news headline on a TV as we pass by. I stop to read it more closely. Ruth Bader Ginsburg has died. I can’t explain why fully, but I instantly know what this will mean. I start crying in the street. For what feels like a long time, I don’t move. My husband wisely doesn’t ask me to.

Until the Equal Credit Opportunity Act of 1974, women weren’t guaranteed access to bank accounts, credit cards, and mortgages without a male cosigner. In 1974, my mother was in college. The world Ruth Bader Ginsburg built her career in is not really ancient history. Maybe not history at all.

It’s 2021 and my husband and I are buying an apartment. The bank prepares the first draft of our mortgage documents. My occupation is listed as “homemaker.”

“It’s just easier this way,” they explain. “His income is higher, and your startup equity is tricky to value.”

I pause, trying on a few responses in my head. Like, isn’t valuing things kind of the job of a bank?

My husband keeps it simple. “We’re not going to sign it this way,” he says. I love him so much in this moment. [And all moments.]

These are just some small examples of what sitting in the problem of misogyny feels like. Sometimes it feels like an alarm going off in your brain, bringing everything into sharp focus. Am I safe in this situation? Do I know where the closest exit is? Sometimes it feels like a red hot anger, followed by a cold splash of reality. This is unfair, but what good would it do to argue? It would probably just make things worse. Sometimes it feels like stunted grief. It’s ok to just pretend this never happened, right?

Most times, it feels like a Tuesday.

You’ve been sitting in it too. Do you see it as the constant, unrelenting presence that it is, or is it something that you think about once a year on international women’s day? Are you sitting right now in a sea of dudes in Patagonia vests? Attending a conference full of male voices? Are you so used to this that you don’t notice it anymore? Maybe it’s time to start noticing it again. To start noticing it constantly. To start thinking that it’s weird. To start telling the people around you that it’s weird, and pushing them to do something about it.

We’ve all got bigger problems right now, you say. And that is true. But we find time to solve much smaller ones, too.

Women are underrepresented in many fields, but finance is a particularly important one. Money is an integral part of autonomy and freedom — without it, people can get trapped in destructive circumstances, and locked out of opportunities. At a societal level, money is deeply interwoven with influence, including influence over policies that disproportionately affect women. Money controls who can get an abortion. Money controls who influences the policies that decide who can get an abortion. Money controls who can leave an abusive relationship. Money controls who can retire. Money controls what diseases get prioritized for research and treatment. Money controls which children go to pre-K, and which children get school lunches. Money controls whether prominent CEOs who have been credibly accused of sexual misconduct get ousted or get to stay in control.

If women are largely absent from the systems that allocate, process, and grow money, then they will be less equipped to control the effects of money on their lives. It is as simple as it is dire.

To the extent that the relative absence of women is recognized as a problem inside the financial industry, it is becoming fashionable now to consider metrics like: does a company have any female board members? Are you using MWBE’s as service providers when you can? [MWBE stands for “Minority and Women owned Business Enterprise.”] These questions are good! Making progress on these metrics is good! But they are also pitifully inadequate.

I imagine some people assume that if you get a few women at the top of organizations (e.g. board members, C-suite executives), then women’s voices will be heard in key decisions at least, and perhaps in time, the lower layers of the organization will diversify. Trickle-down women-omics, you might call it. And it works about as well as its namesake: which is to say, not at all.

Adding a few women near the top of an organization that is overwhelmingly male accomplishes little because it tends to go one of two ways. In one version, the women are hand-picked to be supporters of the status quo — women who “get it” and aren’t expected to push for any meaningful changes. In the second version, the women are given visible positions and titles, but aren’t actually integrated into the company’s power structure in a way that empowers them to affect change.

We should generally be skeptical of companies that have a few visible women near the top, but an engineering team that is > 90% male, for example, especially in large organizations that routinely recruit junior talent. Hiring women into junior positions, even in engineering, just isn’t as hard anymore. In many places (including Columbia University where I used to be on the faculty) the numbers and percentages of women earning engineering degrees have increased impressively in recent years. There is a healthy supply of junior female talent available to those who make an effort to look. Claims that “it’s really hard to hire even junior women” tend to evaporate under a bit of scrutiny. Usually you can just ask: “well, what have you tried?” You might get a blank stare, or a story about how a female engineer who happened to arrive in their recruitment pipeline ended up choosing a competitor. Rarely will you get an answer like: “Well, we partner with organizations like Elpha and NYC Fintech Women to give us access to existing female professional networks, and we work with schools that have strong computer science programs though the schools overall are not as highly ranked, since they often have diverse and talented graduates who are under-recruited by our competitors. And we have differentiating policies like pay transparency, support for remote-work, and internal mentoring programs to appeal to junior employees and set them up for success. And man, it’s just not working!”

When you get to positions that require 5–10 years of experience, it can in fairness be much harder to find female candidates, as the general industry demographics work strongly against you. However, most companies have been claiming to be working on this problem for more than 5–10 years. If they’d started really sourcing and nurturing diverse junior talent in-house when they first claimed to care about this problem, they’d have a healthy cohort of female middle and upper management by now.

But I digress. Let me get back to why the second common metric, use of MWBE service providers, is also a bit of a red herring. When Dan and I first founded Proof, it was just the two of us, and we are equal partners. It would have seemed very plausible from that point for us to structure the business as a MWBE business as we grew, and it is something we have considered from time to time since. But if you look at the MWBE certification requirements in New York State, for example, you will quickly see why this would be hard to accomplish. We would need 51% of the ownership of the qualifying company to be claimed by women and minorities whose individual net worth is < $15 million. This rules out almost all venture capital and angel investors.

Obviously the net worth restriction makes sense. The intention of the certification is not to help super rich women get richer. But this means that any new firm going for the certification needs to either eschew non-minority male co-founders, or raise money from a dramatically smaller pool of investors. So we’re basically telling women entrepreneurs in finance: we’ll give you this certification that is intended to help you succeed…but you can’t partner with the overwhelming majority of experienced financial professionals and/or raise venture capital (in a capital-intensive industry). Should we really be surprised that a broad, strong cadre of women-owned financial service companies has not emerged by now?

It’s time we acknowledge that having a few token women on boards, or a few women on the cap tables of companies that are handicapped by these narrow MWBE requirements, is not going to usher in a new era of progress for women in finance. This is going to be hard, slow-going work. A good first step would be admitting that we have barely started. The low hanging fruit of win-win solutions has not gotten us very far.

So maybe don’t participate in your company’s annual box-checking women’s day event. Maybe don’t agree to speak on that panel where there are no women speaking. Maybe start reflecting on the fact that the articles you read and the podcasts you listen to are dominated by male voices, and start seeking out some new sources. Advocate for policies like salary bands that could help your disadvantaged colleagues, even if they could hurt you. Advocate for changes that could actually move the needle on representation, like childcare benefits and flexible work arrangements, even when they cost companies money and go against your personal preferences. And don’t walk away placated when management says “well, we hosted a women’s lunch where everyone got a free copy of Lean In.” [Don’t get me wrong, copies of Lean In can be useful! If someone gave me one, I would happily use it for target practice.]

This year marks my 20th high school reunion. Part of me wonders what it would feel like to go back to that place, to stand in what used to be my math classroom. To feel how small it would feel now, how strangely ordinary. To marvel at the power that it held over me as a fifteen year old, making me hate math. A lot has changed since then. I’ve graduated from college and gotten my PhD. I’ve become a well-known scientist in my field, and taught thousands of students as a college professor. I’ve done research that is put into practice by a US stock exchange and co-founded an algorithmic trading business. But I know that standing there in that classroom now, I wouldn’t feel proud. I would feel ashamed. Because I don’t think we’ve made much progress. My ten year old niece says she wants to be a women’s rights activist when she grows up. I’m very proud of her, but I darkly think: “at least she’ll have good job security.”

I should tell Jordan he was right about my path to being a writer. In some sense, I did have to become a mathematician first. And this problem I’ve spent 20 years wanting to run away from — right now, it’s the only thing I want to write about.