‘Have You Ever Been Sexually Harassed?’

(Bloomberg) -- Sallie Krawcheck made it to the top of Wall Street. She was chief financial officer of Citigroup and chief executive officer of Citi’s wealth management business—before she got fired. “If you asked me when it happened if I got fired from Citi because I’m a woman, I would have told you, absolutely not,” she told Fast Company in 2014. “But now I’d say: not exactly.”

Krawcheck went on to start Ellevest, an investing platform aimed at closing the gender wealth gap. For someone like Bianca Caban, a recent Columbia Business School graduate, Krawcheck is somewhere between a Wall Street role model and a feminist idol, so we sat the two down to talk about what it takes to make it in the male-dominated world of finance. Krawcheck didn’t hold back. Sexual harassment and bias existed when she was coming up, and Caban will likely face the same hurdles as she progresses in her career.

This spring The Pay Check podcast took a hard look at the pay gap, its history, why it still exists and what’s being done to fix it. If there was one thing we wanted to achieve with our series, it was to get people—especially women—talking. And it worked.

After the show ended, the conversation didn’t. We heard from listeners who told us their own stories of pay discrimination and sexism, and we here at Bloomberg kept reporting on and talking about the pay gap and all the other issues we discussed on the show.

But we wanted to do more. We wanted to hear—for ourselves—the conversations we know women are having with each other, behind closed doors, about work and being women. So we went out and found some of the smartest women we could think of who work in law, finance, medicine, and even competitive poker. Then we asked them to talk to each other while we listened.

For the next few weeks, we’re going to be bringing those conversations to you.

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Jillian Goodman at jgoodman74@bloomberg.net

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