The New York Times has a long and interesting article on how Sallie Krawcheck, Citigroup’s former chief financial officer, was pushed to the sidelines of the bank’s senior management and ended up leaving. The piece includes a lot of detail about what happened from “a person with direct knowledge of her thinking”, who is so well informed that I assume it to be Ms Krawcheck herself.

It concludes that Ms Krawcheck was the victim of internal politics and her falling-out with Vikram Pandit, the bank’s chairman and chief executive, rather than sexism:

Ms Krawcheck believes her exit from Citigroup is the result of pressures she faced from Mr Pandit to be a team player and to follow his lead on the best way to deploy talent at the bank — and not related to her sex. The two also sparred over how to compensate clients who lost money by following the bank’s investment advice.

That seems plausible, although the financial crisis has been brutal for several of the women who formerly occupied senior positions on Wall Street. The biggest names to lose their jobs apart from Ms Krawcheck were Zoe Cruz, former co-president of Morgan Stanley and Erin Callan, former chief financial officer of Lehman Brothers.

Since most Wall Street banks got into serious trouble under their former senior management teams, it is hardly surprising that many people got swept out of the executive suite. They included plenty of men in addition to these women.

That said, Mr Pandit is in a somewhat awkward position since he fell out with two of them - not only Ms Krawcheck but also, when he was at Morgan Stanley, with Ms Cruz. This article in New York Magazine details some of the tensions between him and Ms Cruz.

In Mr Pandit’s defence, neither Ms Krawcheck nor Ms Cruz seem to believe that his attitude to them was based on their sex. Still, it is reasonable to wonder how well Mr Pandit generally gets on with women in senior positions.

There are, according to my count from information on Citi’s website, seven women on Citi’s 54-strong “senior leadership committee”; one woman on its 15-strong executive committee; and two women on its 15-member board. Wall Street is heavily male-dominated so these are not awful ratios, but neither are they impressive.

Ms Krawcheck’s departure means that Terri Dial, Citi’s head of consumer banking in North America, is the only woman on the executive committee. At the least, this puts Ms Dial in a good bargaining position: Mr Pandit would not want her to leave as well.

November 16, 2008 8:40pm in Finance, Management | Comment