Action Sports with Leigh Roche

Barbara Byrne, one of the most accomplished and powerful women in the banking industry, has seen a lot in her more than 30 years on Wall Street.

But earlier this month, the vice chair of investment banking at Barclays had a rare first experience: She rang the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange.

The 59-year-old banking veteran was there to launch the new Barclays Women in Leadership Index, which at its inception consisted of 85 companies that have either women CEOs or boards that are at least 25 percent female. The idea, Byrne said, is to create a kind of “social pressure” for companies to strive to be more inclusive of women in the workplace and empower female employees to rise through the ranks.

Companies will hopefully start saying, “I’d like to be in that index too. What does it take to be in that index?” Byrne said in a recent interview. “Peter Drucker once said, ‘What gets measured gets done,’ and it’s been my experience that when you set goals and you quantify them, that people tend to perform toward them.”

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Byrne herself has set a high bar for what women can accomplish in the male-dominated world of banking.

In 2005, she became the first woman to earn the title of “vice chairman” at Lehman Brothers, where she worked for almost three decades before it collapsed in the 2008 financial crisis. When the firm was purchased by Barclays, Byrne transitioned over to the British bank. Her current position in New York makes her one of the most prominent women in an industry that she says she loves both for its intensity and innovation.

Though promotion of women on Wall Street has grown by leaps and bounds over the past several decades, Byrne recalls that it wasn’t always that way.

“I started in 1980 and started at a private investment bank at that point called Lehman Brothers Kuhn Loeb. There were seven first-year associates,” she said. “But of those seven first-year associates, two were women.”

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Born in Holyoke, Massachusetts, and a graduate of Mount Holyoke College, Byrne says she would like to see more women be appointed to top finance-related government positions. In a recent interview, she discussed a range of issues including the changing gender landscape in the world of banking, the challenges and lessons of juggling motherhood and work, and advice she has for young women looking to make it on Wall Street.

Have Wall Street and the world of finance become more inclusive work environments for women over the past few decades?

“They certainly have strived to. It’s a very different world than it was in the 1980s in the world of finance today. There are women’s networks, there’s diversity initiatives, there’s awareness, there’s intent. There are maternity leave programs that didn’t exist in the ’80s.”

“There are many more attempts on the part of the industry, which is dominated at the very top by men, to actually create those opportunities and parts of the financial services sector have a tremendous number of women.”...