Winning Women

Even as women make up the majority of the industry’s support staff, filling 24,000 of 32,000 administrative positions at Citigroup according to its diversity report last year, they hold few of its top spots. Just two are on the firm’s operating committee with 22 men. The 11 Goldman Sachs executive officers and top dozen at Morgan Stanley include one woman each.

Evolution comes slowly, according to Jeff Urwin, head of investment banking at JPMorgan Chase & Co. The firm’s Winning Women program has led to about 13 additional hires each year since 2004.

“You tend to think of an institution in a structured way, but it’s actually a big organic entity,” Urwin said. “Driving any kind of change that gets at the culture in an organism is hard because it tends to return to the original form, if you don’t maintain that consistent pressure to drive that change.”

JPMorgan employs 140 Sigma Phi Epsilon members, according to an article on job preparation in the fraternity’s magazine this year. It shows only Bank of America and Wells Fargo employing more.

Grand Smudge

Fraternities have become so good at filling Wall Street’s openings that firms can hire several alumni for each woman. There are at least four members among 14 associates at San Francisco-based private-equity firm Hellman & Friedman LLC, according to resumes posted to LinkedIn. Two of the 14 are female. Fraternity brothers outnumber women four to one in the analyst program at Peter J. Solomon Co., a New York investment bank founded by the former Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. vice chairman. Spokeswomen for both companies declined to comment.

When those men and women make it to the top, Wall Street’s bosses have a secret society all their own with parties in Manhattan’s St. Regis Hotel. Kappa Beta Phi, founded before 1929’s stock-market crash, throws an annual bash where bankers and billionaires in tuxedos are entertained by neophytes who sometimes don ladies dresses and pumps. Officers called Grand Swipe, Grand Smudge and Grand Loaf lead revelers who’ve included former Goldman Sachs head Sidney J. Weinberg, American International Group Inc. CEO Robert Benmosche and Mary Schapiro, who ran the Securities and Exchange Commission until last year.

Cohen’s Pledge

The fraternity pipeline works in reverse, too, when those titans return to campus bearing gifts as large as billionaire Steven Cohen’s $2 million pledge to Penn’s Zeta Beta Tau. His SAC Capital Advisors LP pleaded guilty last month to insider- trading charges.