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Sallie Krawcheck's professional mission is to help women reach their financial and professional goals. She is the CEO and co-founder of Ellevest, a just-launched digital investment platform for women. She is the chair of Ellevate Network, a many-thousand-strong global professional women's network. And she is the chair of the Pax Ellevate Global Women's Index Fund, which invests in the top-rated companies for advancing women. Krawcheck is the author of "Own It: The Power of Women at Work", released in January of 2017. She has been named among the top ten of Fast Company's "100 Most Creative People" list. Before becoming an entrepreneur, she was CEO of Merrill Lynch Wealth Management and of Smith Barney.
KRAWCHECK WILL BE THE KEYNOTE SPEAKER AT CFA'S FIRST WOMEN IN COMMERCIAL FINANCE CONFERENCE, SEPTEMBER 27-28, IN NEW YORK CITY.
In your book. Own It, you propose that women should have the freedom to be women at work and not feel pressured to act like men. You state that the unique strengths possessed by women can, in fact, be what drives their success and the success of their organizations. Can you explain for our readers what you mean by this?
So much of the advice that women get is to be more confident, raise your hand if you're not ready for the job, take on responsibilities, take on more risk. In other words, in some ways adopt some more masculine qualities.
This direction, in essence, informs us to conform to the organizations as they exist today, organizations that promote males, that typically have male CEOs and executive teams. And the work that I've laid out in the book on diversity shows that it is the different characteristics that women can bring to work, or any people of difference bring to work, that drives the power of diversity, which leads to higher returns such as company performance, greater innovation, etc. It just strikes me that taking these qualities that make for diverse workforces, and then trying to turn everybody into similar versions of each other, negates the power of diversity.
Sometimes it helps to think about it not as men versus women, but to think about an introvert versus an extrovert. If you're a manager, it's just easier to manage extroverts. And...