'I'll Pay For Your Abortion'

And other horror stories from 1970s Wall Street.

Photo by Chenyu Guan on Unsplash

ALSO IN THIS POST…

• Share of women in the C-suite is falling across corporate America

• Latest on WOMEN MONEY POWER

Last week I wrote about my relationship with the color pink, but I also mentioned one of the women I profile in my book: Neale Godfrey. As well as being an unapologetic champion of women in the workplace, Godfrey is a master storyteller, and it feels wrong to mention without providing a true flavor of who Godfrey is and the brilliant, fearless ways in which she’s navigated all of the things that life so far has thrown at her.

Born in West Caldwell, New Jersey, in 1951, Neale had entertained the idea of becoming a diplomat. She graduated from the American University in Washington, D.C., majoring in international relations, and then spent time in the Middle East and South America. After marrying an aspiring lawyer when she was in her early twenties, though, she acknowledged that she would need a job to earn a living. The couple had moved back to New Jersey to accommodate his studies, and, at the age of twenty-one, Godfrey was approached by a recruiter for Chase Manhattan who was seeking a Spanish speaker to support the bank’s clients in Latin America. She couldn’t write shorthand and had no foundation in math or anything numerical, but the recruiter insisted she should apply for the job.

“Years later, I figured out that I was actually part of an experiment,” Godfrey recalls today. “Someone at the bank had proposed the idea of hiring women into men’s jobs,” she explains. “I was meant to serve as evidence that women just weren’t suited to these types of jobs. But as it turned out, I proved the opposite.”

On the day before her final interview, Godfrey caught the subway downtown on a fact-finding mission. “I wanted to see what women who worked on Wall Street wore, but obviously all I saw was gray suits, black suits, and navy suits,” she recalls. She opted for a simple A-line dress and carried an empty briefcase, unsure of what all the men she’d observed carried around in theirs.

Godfrey became one of the first women to work for Chase Manhattan as anything other than a secretary. She initially joined on an annual salary of $11,000 but was soon told by the head of personnel that she should actually be paid only $6,500, “because she was taking the job of a man.” But while that ignited in her a rage that’s still palpable when she talks about it four decades later, there was something else that shook her to the core.

“When I was offered the position in 1972, my boss leaned across his desk, looked me in the eye, and issued a stern warning. I was not, under any circumstances, to get pregnant, he barked,” Godfrey remembers.

When, about a year later, she confessed that she was actually expecting a baby, his reaction terrified her. “I didn’t mind him screaming at me, though,” she recalls. “What deeply, deeply upset me was that he offered to pay for an abortion—for me to get rid of it. To this day, I have no words to describe how that made me feel.”

But Godfrey persisted. Over the following decade, she worked her way up the ranks at Chase, chalking up achievements that included structuring and executing chemical company DuPont’s multi-billion-dollar acquisition of oil giant Conoco, the most expensive corporate takeover battle in history at the time.

She worked closely with barons of the industry, like David Rockefeller, with whom she struck up a friendship. Rockefeller, who served as chief executive of Chase from 1969 until 1980 and as chairman for one more year after that, developed a fond affection for Godfrey. On one occasion, she recalls, she was invited to a client meeting at a member’s club in Connecticut, which Rockefeller was also attending. They traveled there together. “We were told upon arrival that I, as a woman, couldn’t go in through the front door and would have to enter the club through the kitchen,” she explains. “I was annoyed but didn’t want to make a scene, so I started heading toward the kitchen, but David didn’t skip a beat,” she remembers. “‘If Neale goes through the kitchen, so do I,’ he said. And off we went.”

Godfrey shared several other stories with me for the book and in doing so helped me to understand just how far we’ve come, but also, how much work still remains to be done. “Every generation has a responsibility to call out and do what they can to fix the mistakes of the last,” she says. “There’s so much more work to do.”

As recently as 2021, Women in Banking and Finance, a nonprofit, and the Lon- don School of Economics surveyed women working in the industry and found that a significant proportion felt that they were expected to be exceptional in order to achieve the same level of success as “mediocre” men.

When prompted to explain, the respondents said that their ability to progress was limited by factors including men belonging to a social group in which other men served as gatekeepers; men always being around, while a woman was more likely to take parental leave; and— almost unbelievably—a lingering reluctance among team leaders to “manage out” men, because they were still more frequently viewed as breadwinners.

This is the work that Godfrey is referring to when she says that so much more still needs to be done. As one of the first female executives on Wall Street, she started something. But it’s now up to us not to undermine all of those valiant efforts she made to effect change.

Women and the C-Suite

Elsewhere last week, I came across coverage of a new report showing that, for the first time in nearly twenty years, the proportion of women in the C-suite at publicly traded companies across the US has fallen. Overall, the report showed, growth in the percentage of women in senior corporate leadership roles has barely budged over the last two years.

“The growth in women’s representation among senior corporate positions, once a bright spot for gender parity, potentially faces an alarming turning point,” according to the researcher who wrote the report published by S&P. “Exponential growth over a decade is showing signs of losing momentum,” they added.

According to their findings women last year held just 11.8% of the approximately 15,000 C-suite roles examined. That was a decrease from the 12.2% of jobs a year earlier.

Writing for CNN, Jeanne Sahadi notes that a possible contributing factor is a “waning focus on diversity and equity efforts” and less spending associated with these initiatives.

“The peak of DEI mentions came in 2020 during the Covid pandemic. But the mentions of ‘diversity’ and ‘inclusion’ in 2023 fell to the lowest levels since 2012,” writes Sahadi.

WOMEN MONEY POWER: The Book

It’s been another really great week of talking about the book—mostly to corporations—and spotting it out “in the wild.”

I had the pleasure of joining Standard Chartered to moderate a conversation for an event in honor of Women’s History Month. In my opening remarks I applauded the organizers for choosing the first week of April for the event. What a great reminder that we can celebrate women’s history in months other than March, I said in my opening remarks.

One of the people on the panel I was moderating was Dominique Dawes. Her name might ring a bell: she was a 10-year member of the U.S. national gymnastics team, a three-time Olympian, a World Championship silver and bronze medalist, and a member of the gold-medal-winning "Magnificent Seven" team at the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta.

She promised me she’d read my book so naturally I asked for a photograph.

One final, shameless request. If you’ve read the book, I would massively appreciate it if you could take just 30 seconds to post a review on Amazon using this link. If Goodreads is your jam, that’s just as great and you can leave a review it here. Thank you so much for your support, as ever!

Upcoming Public Events

LONDON

• TONIGHT! April 8 (7pm) I’ll be at Waterstones, Trafalgar Square, in conversation with the author of WOMEN WHO WON, Ros Ball. Buy your ticket here!

• April 11 (6pm) I’ll be at The Conduit Club in conversation with Paul van Zyl, Co-Founder of The Conduit. Register here!