Sallie L. Krawcheck started her career with a journalism degree hoping to write about the financial world. She didn’t know she’d rise to the top of that world instead.

After graduating summa cum laude from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1987, she got a job on Wall Street at Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. as an equity analyst, hoping that experience would shape a budding reporting career. But she never made it back to journalism. Instead she moved up the ranks—to the position of research director, then chairwoman and CEO of the sell-side research firm.

She would later go on to Citigroup and then Bank of America, where she was the chief of Merrill Lynch Wealth Management.

She has throughout her career developed a reputation as someone who was right many more times than she was wrong. She has amassed an impressive number of honors, too, such as being named by Forbes as No. 7 on its list of the World’s 100 Most Powerful Women in 2005.

“I saw a real opportunity in doing financial research,” Krawcheck said in an interview with Financial Advisor about the turns her career has taken. “Finances look like a puzzle [you get to solve by] seeing patterns others do not see. Then you get to see if you’re right.”

Her journey to the top has also allowed her to promote women’s interests along the way.

Now, at the age of 53, she is an outspoken advocate for women advisors and investors and is considered a titan in the financial industry.

Krawcheck, now the CEO of Ellevest, a New York-based digital investment platform for women, will share some of her experiences and the lessons she has learned at the 2018 Invest In Women conference, sponsored by Financial Advisor and Private Wealth magazines, in Houston April 30 to May 2.

Pioneer

Krawcheck’s work has allowed her to be a pioneer in many respects, not just as a woman in a world dominated by men. She has been widely published in both social and traditional media, with articles focusing on Wall Street regulatory reform, and she is also advising a number of start-up firms.

At Bernstein, she earned a reputation for giving impartial advice and bucking trends, if necessary. When she decided to take the company out of the lucrative, but conflicted, underwriting business, Fortune magazine called her “the last honest analyst.”

Citigroup later chose her to deal with criticisms of conflicts of interest within its wealth management and research business after charges were brought against the company by former New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer. Krawcheck was put in charge of the 13,000 brokers and analysts in the new retail brokerage unit, Smith Barney, set up to separate Citigroup’s investment banking from its stock brokering and research operations to avoid the appearance of a conflict of interest in those areas.

Krawcheck earned more accolades after she was named CEO of the Smith Barney unit, for which she was named to Time magazine’s 2002 list of Global Influentials and Fortune’s list of the most influential people under the age of 40.

After Citigroup’s private bank had been banned from doing business in Japan for conflicts with its sales practices, Krawcheck helped tackle the problem by working on changing the corporate culture for Smith Barney’s financial advisors as an early advocate of a fiduciary standard for the brokerage industry.

She went on to Bank of America/Merrill Lynch to head its new wealth management division in 2009. She led the unit to $3.1 billion in profits during her two years there.

Glass Ceilings

As Krawcheck advanced in her career, she saw that women were getting short shrift from the male advisors who dominated the industry. “I saw the industry not doing a good job for women,” she says. “You only have to go back a few years to find a time when the financial industry saw women as a niche market.”

She wanted to change that situation. Because she could not interest financial services corporations in starting a service catering specifically to women investors, she started her own. In 2016, she co-founded Ellevest, launching the firm after doing extensive work with women investors (and potential women investors) to see what they wanted out of a digital platform.

Ellevest was designed to close the investment gap between men and women. It has a diverse workforce as well. The staff is 60% female and 40% people of color.

Krawcheck is also the chairwoman of Ellevate Network (formerly 85 Broads Unlimited), an organization of female professionals that support other businesswomen.

She believes failing to network with other successful women is the biggest mistake women can make in their careers, particularly in their 30s, once they are established in a career and ready to start climbing the ladder of success.

She describes herself as a financial feminist. She says she had an “aha” moment when she realized that, despite her powerful presence, the financial world was being run by men for men—and kept women from reaching their financial goals. Now she has devoted her career to unleashing women’s financial power.

The investment gap between men and women is still wide open for a number of reasons, Krawcheck declares. For instance, factors such as life expectancy often are not taken into consideration when planning for women. “Women live longer than men, and if that is not taken into account, they will end up on the short end of the stick,” she says.

“Also, men like the game of outperforming the market, but women are not engaged in that. Their whole question is whether they will reach their goals and not about what happens in between.”

Because women are not getting good advice, they are often “keeping too much money in cash,” she says. “If women are not investing, they are costing themselves hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of dollars over a lifetime.”

She also warns advisors against adopting the myths about women investors—that they are more risk-averse than men or take longer to commit to a plan. Or that they don’t understand finances and shy away from investing.

It’s perhaps not a coincidence that while women investors are not being catered to by most advisors, there is a perpetual dearth of female advisors. “Efforts are being made to improve the percentage of women in the field, but women have made up 14% to 16% of advisors since the beginning of time,” Krawcheck says.

She encourages women to join the financial field but warns them to be careful when picking a place to land. “If you are the only woman in the office, it means the company has missed what is going on demographically. The same is true for being appointed to a board of directors. You don’t want to be the only woman on the board. That is a warning sign that it is not an open environment,” she says.   

Sallie L. Krawcheck is a speaker at the 4th Annual Invest In Women conference, being held April 29-May 2 in Houston.