Washington: Work in a bar. That was a friend's suggestion for Harvard graduate Sara Grillo after she was laid off from Lehman Brothers Holdings in 2008.
Two years later, the hedge-fund analyst is campaigning to get more women into top financial jobs.
Grillo, 32, who co-manages hedge fund advisor Diamond Oak Capital Advisors, found herself among 225,000 unemployed finance workers that year as the subprime market collapsed.
Dismayed by friends' suggestions that she quit finance, Grillo vowed to help more women join the industry, setting a goal of raising the proportion of female Chartered Financial Analysts to 50 per cent from the current 19 per cent.
"If I were a tall, broad-shouldered, grey-haired, 50-year-old man with the same credentials, nobody would have suggested I take a job for less than one eighth of my salary," said Grillo, who lives in Queens, New York.
"I'm a CFA charterholder and I always look women right in the face and tell them that if I did it, they can do it as well." Of the some 90,000 CFA charter recipients worldwide, 19 per cent are women, according to CFA Institute figures.
Grillo's efforts to balance the numbers include giving motivational speeches.
Her most personal approach, though, is to mentor 20 people, some from New York University's Stern School of Business where she got her MBA in 2007, or Harvard University where she read English Literature, or the New York Society of Security Analysts, the local chapter of the CFA Institute.
"One of the women I met on the subway in Queens," Grillo said. "She was having a really tough time with a guy giving her trouble and I looked at her and I said: ‘Look, you don't need this guy. You can do so much better than this.'"
Another is Nan Zhao, 25, whom Grillo met after offering an internship for Diamond Oak on LinkedIn's website. Zhao, from China, immigrated to the United States in 2007 to study. "Looking for a job in finance after the financial crisis was already really difficult because of all the layoffs," said Zhao, who earned an MBA at San Francisco State University.
"Because I don't have any experience and because I'm also a foreigner here it was even harder."
