Madeline McWhinney, Who Broke Fed’s Gender Barriers, Dies at 98

(Bloomberg) -- Madeline McWhinney, an economist who broke through gender barriers to become the first female officer in the Federal Reserve System during a 30-year career with the central bank, has died. She was 98.

She died June 19, according to an online death notice published by the Thompson Memorial Home in Red Bank, New Jersey.

McWhinney, the daughter of a banker, piled up firsts as she advanced into the Fed’s management ranks in the 1960s when women were barred from executive washrooms and luncheon clubs. Despite her trailblazing, she didn’t consider herself part of the women’s liberation movement.

“I did the things that the men didn’t want to do, and one of them in those days was the computer” because working with punch cards was a nuisance, McWhinney said in a 2008 oral history interview for the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. “That was very fortunate for me, because it led to a lot of other very interesting things.”

McWhinney joined the New York Fed, the largest and most powerful of the Fed’s 12 regional banks, as a junior statistician in 1943. The position was available because men were away fighting World War II. At the time, the windows of the building in lower Manhattan were painted black in case of air raids. After the war, she helped the Fed move into the computer age, traveling abroad to coordinate with other central banks.

Volcker Assist

In 1955, McWhinney was named chief of the financial and trade statistics division, becoming the first woman to hold the position. That same year, bank employees elected her the first female trustee overseeing the Federal Reserve’s pension system, unseating an incumbent board member. Paul Volcker, a staff economist and future Fed chairman, was her campaign manager.

Five years later, McWhinney was appointed manager of a new department gathering data on trading in government securities, making her the central bank’s first female officer. In 1967, she was promoted to assistant vice president, in charge of statistics, managing a staff of 75 employees, according to a New York Times article.

The obstacles she faced included denial of a perk available to all other officers: an executive lavatory. A sign at the entrance read “Officers Only,” and might as well have said “Men Only.” McWhinney was denied entry to the Union League Club in Philadelphia. Even the New York Fed’s Open Market trading room barred her until Allan Sproul, the bank’s president, intervened.

“You just lived with it,” McWhinney said in 2008. “I had a lot of experiences that, fortunately, never happen anymore.”

Bank President

McWhinney retired in 1973 and helped found First Women’s Bank, making her the first female bank president in the state. The New York-based lender was formed to address the credit needs of women, who often couldn’t get loans or charge cards in their own names.

“Bankers have been ignoring a big market,” McWhinney said when First Women’s opened in 1975, according to an article in Newsweek magazine. “They still have the Victorian notion that women don’t want to bother their pretty little heads about investing and financial management.”

Her new role raised her public profile, and she landed on the cover of U.S. News & World Report in April 1976. McWhinney resigned from First Women’s less than a year after it opened.

From 1977 to 1994, she was president of her husband’s management consulting firm, Dale, Elliott & Co.

Madeline Houston McWhinney was born on March 11, 1922, in Denver, to Leroy McWhinney, a bank vice president, and the former Alice Houston. She attended the Sandia School, a private academy for girls in Albuquerque, New Mexico, according to a profile on the National Women’s History Museum website.

Early Career

McWhinney enrolled in Smith College, in Northampton, Massachusetts, graduating in 1943. Four years later, she earned an MBA at New York University.

In 1961, McWhinney married John D. Dale Jr. and continued using her maiden name professionally.

She did stints as a director of the American Stock Exchange and served on the boards of corporations and civic institutions including the Whitney Museum of American Art.

“I’ve had minimal involvement with the women’s liberation movement over the years, mainly because I think of myself as an economist and an officer with a job to do, not as a woman,” McWhinney said, according to a 1973 issue of the Fed magazine.

She did advise younger women about the obstacles they would face in their careers. In a 1977 speech at Cornell University McWhinney said workplace discrimination would endure for at least another generation and that female executives needed to be better than men to succeed.

In a 2013 interview with Forbes, McWhinney urged career-minded women to set goals.

“Know where you want to go and go there,” she said.

With her husband, who died in 1993, she had one son, Thomas D. Dale, who worked in New York as a managing director at BMO Financial Group’s investment and corporate banking unit.

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