The Washington Women Who Leaned In When
Sheryl Sandberg Didn't
Michael
Hirsh
Source:
Nationaljournal.com
(Mar. 12, 2013)
While debate rages outside the Beltway over Sheryl
Sandberg's advice for fixing a male-dominated world, here in Washington, a
handful of powerful women have been "leaning" way ahead of her in taking on what
may be the most chauvinistic industry in America: Wall Street. (And, in a few
cases, they've done it while raising families at the same time.)
They may not be getting quite as much air time -- or
publicity -- as Facebook's Sandberg, whose book, Lean In: Women, Work and the
Will to Lead, is now topping Amazon's best-seller list. But they may have a few
things to teach her. It's a striking theme in finance that goes back to well
before the crisis of 2008: Very often the gutsiest and most prescient
adversaries of Wall Street have been women, many of them tough regulators who
looked over their shoulders and found scant few male supporters when it came to
confronting the (typically all male) titans of finance and economics. Among
them: new Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass.; former Obama economic adviser
Christina Romer; retired bank regulator Sheila Bair; and Brooksley Born, who as a
far-sighted derivatives overseer in the late '90s took on the powerful Robert
Rubin cabal and, for her troubles, was railroaded out of government.
A new member of this distinctive club is now
expected: Mary Jo White, who will shortly be confirmed as the new head of the
Securities and Exchange Commission. Despite questions about White's potential
conflicts of interest -- she has occasionally represented Wall Streeters -- no
one doubts her toughness and willingness to confront aggressive men: During her
nine-year stint as U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, the
5-foot-tall White won convictions of senior al-Qaida leaders and Mafiosi such as
John Gotti. She has since promised "unrelenting" enforcement of Wall Street.
Setting aside Arab terrorist groups and the mob,
there may be no harsher world for women to make headway in than Wall Street.
Especially compared to the nerds of Silicon Valley, no corporate culture is more
macho than Wall Street's, which is perhaps why its heaviest hitters used to be
known by a part of their anatomy that women don't share.
Consider Warren, who almost immediately upon being
sworn in as a new U.S. senator picked up where she had left off as the fiery
Harvard Law professor who first came up with the idea for a financial
consumer-protection agency. In a February hearing, Warren quickly took the
"too-big-to-fail" debate to a new level, hammering a panel of stammering
regulators over their failure to prosecute bank criminality. "There are district
attorneys and United States attorneys out there every day squeezing ordinary
citizens on sometimes very thin grounds and taking them to trial in order to
'make an example,' as they put it," Warren said. "I'm really concerned that 'too
big to fail' has become 'too big for trial.' "
Romer, meanwhile, appeared to be the only one with
the guts to tell Larry Summers -- in his second incarnation as a mistake-prone
economic adviser, this time under Obama -- that the administration's first-term
stimulus was too small. Working in a White House that author Ron Suskind
described as a "boys' club," Romer wrote what one pundit, Business Insider's Joe
Weisenthal
(http://www.businessinsider.com/this-is-the-memo-that-could-have-saved-the-us-economy-2012-2?op=1),
called "the Memo that Could Have Saved the U.S. Economy." She showed -- probably
correctly -- that something on the order of a $1.8 trillion stimulus was needed
but was squelched by Summers, who she said made her feel like "like a piece of
meat" when he "boxed" her out, according to Suskind's Confidence Men: Wall
Street, Washington, and the Education of a President.
And then there was Bair, who saw back in the early
2000s, when she was assistant Treasury secretary under Paul O'Neill, that the
lending industry and a securitization-mad Wall Street were out of control. Bair
sought to impose "best practices" on the lending industry, including rules that
would require documentation of a borrower's ability to repay; and limiting
refinancing to prevent loan flipping. She failed and, after a hiatus to raise
her children in Massachusetts, came roaring back as the head of the Federal
Deposit Insurance Corp., becoming the principal challenger to the often
excessively cautious decisions of Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner on housing and
regulation. In her strikingly blunt new memoir, Bull by the Horns, Bair wrote of
Geithner: "I couldn't think of one Dodd-Frank reform that Tim strongly
supported. Resolution authority, derivatives reform, the Volcker and Collins
amendments -- he had worked to weaken or oppose them all."
Bair, a Republican from Kansas, had something common
with another tough female regulator, Born, who
happened to be a liberal Democrat (sexism apparently knows no politics). Both
ran up against the same problem: accusations from the men in charge that they
weren't "team players." In Bair's case, Geithner's Treasury Department was
accused of leaking that story; when it came to Born, she found herself taking on the powerful team of
Rubin and then-Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, as well as most of
Congress (at one point she was forced to leave the hospital while her daughter
was in the operating room when she was called up to testify).
Born, the head of the
Commodity Futures Trading Commission, was eventually pressured to step down. But
much later on, one of the men who had pilloried her, Arthur Levitt, the chairman
of the Securities and Exchange Commission during the Clinton years, became one
of the few men to publicly vindicate her for warnings about the vast
over-the-counter derivatives market that was about to help melt down the
financial system. "All tragedies in life are always proceeded by warnings," he
told me. "We had a warning. It was Brooksley
Born. We didn't listen to that."
So pay attention, Sheryl: You've got some serious
role models here. Of course, it may be that the life lessons of some of these
women could bring back uncomfortable memories for you. As my colleague Matt
Cooper pointed out yesterday
(http://www.nationaljournal.com/politics/two-cheers-for-sheryl-sandberg-who-helped-give-us-the-financial-crisis-201),
Sandberg herself did precious little "leaning in" in the late '90s while serving
as chief of staff to then-Treasury Secretary Summers, when he helped hand Wall
Street license to wreak disaster on the American economy.
