Insights
Periodic insights from our Investment and Private Client Teams on a broad range of investment and advice-related topics
By Sarah Bull, FCSI®, CIM®, Managing Partner & Portfolio Manager
A Look Back on the Great Female Investors
When the recent history of investing is told, the achievements of investors like Warren Buffett, Benjamin Graham, and Peter Lynch come to mind, and for good reason. These brilliant investors are among the most successful in history, and their philosophies continue to shape financial markets today.
For International Women’s Day, there is another story to be told when it comes to the history of investing. It’s about women investors and pioneers – the ones who built fortunes, founded firms and challenged discrimination during times when most business affairs were controlled entirely by men.
The below takes a look back at five of these inspiring figures and how they helped pave the way for women in finance. Their stories are a powerful reminder of how far we’ve come.
Ethel Ayres Purdie – First Woman Accountant in the UK
1874-1923
Ethel Ayres Purdie was a pioneering accountant, tax expert, and activist for women’s rights. She was the first female accountant in the UK and spent her career establishing and running a successful business.
In the early 1900s, despite expectations that she remain a housewife after marrying and having two children, Purdie trained as an accountant and opened her own business in 1906. In 1909, she became the first woman admitted to the London Association of Accountants (LAA). For the next nine years, the LAA was only one of seven professional accountancy bodies open to women.
As a member of the Women’s Freedom League and a founder of the Women’s Tax Resistance League, she encouraged women to resist paying taxes until they gained political representation. At the time, as a women running her own business, tax forms were still sent to her husband to fill out on her behalf. After she resolutely refused to give him the information he would have needed to fill in the return (a position fully supported by her husband), he was often threatened with imprisonment as result.
In addition to offering accounting services, Ethel started working as an intermediary for women seeking to invest in or find partners or buyers for their businesses – she also expanded her business to include buying and selling stocks and shares and putting in place a range of insurances and annuities as well as mortgage loans.
The London Association of Accountants, now the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants, rightly celebrates its role in opening up the profession to women. It’s pioneers like Ethel Ayres Purdie who helped make that progress possible, challenging the barriers that excluded women from professional life, and proving that they could thrive as leaders in finance and business.
Muriel “Mickie” Siebert – the “First Woman of Finance”
1928-2013
Muriel “Mickie” Siebert was a fearless Wall Street broker who is widely recognized as the “First Woman of Finance.” Over a career spanning nearly six decades, she became a pioneering female business leader who transformed opportunities for women in finance.
In 1954, Siebert moved to New York to pursue her dream of working in finance at a time when the only women working on Wall Street were secretaries and support staff. She got her first job training as a research analyst. By the mid-1960s, having switched firms several times, Siebert was ready to purchase her own seat on the stock exchange, which would allow her to buy and sell shares directly on the trading floor. There was no specific rule against a woman doing so, but she needed a backer, and went through nine male colleagues before one said yes.
The next step was for her to raise enough money to afford the cost of a seat. The stock exchange told her that she would have to pay $445,000 and $300,000 of the price had to come from a bank. After two years, Chase Manhattan bank loaned her the money and in 1967, Siebert became the first woman to purchase a seat on the New York Stock Exchange, breaking a barrier that had stood for 175 years. She remained the lone woman with a seat alongside 1,365 men for the next decade.
Siebert went on to found and lead her own brokerage firm, Muriel Siebert & Co., and later became the first woman to serve as superintendent of banks for the state of New York. Her success made her one of Wall Street’s most popular names. Following her death in 2013, she is known for both her professional milestones and for reshaping the role of women in business and finance.
Jean Davey – First Female Stockbroker in Canada
1933 – present
Jean Davey is widely recognized as a pioneering figure in Canadian finance and a trailblazer for women in the investment industry. At a time when the world of stock trading was overwhelmingly male-dominated, she became the first woman in Canada to earn a stockbroker’s license.
Jean Davy began her career stuffing envelopes at General Motors, then became a secretary for the President, before moving on to sales and then into investing. After becoming a licensed stockbroker in the early 1960s, she went on to find success on the trading floor and climbed as high as the number two salesperson out of 200 colleagues.
Davey’s documented her 50-year career in her memoir, The Only Woman in the Room: The Making of a Stockbroker. The book follows her inspiring and remarkable ascent on Bay Street and her career spanning 50 years.
Davey’s accomplishments ultimately led to her appointment as Vice President and Director at ScotiaMcLeod. Davey retired from this role in 2004, leaving a legacy as one of the most prominent women in Canadian financial services during her era.
Geraldine Weiss – the “Grande Dame of Dividends”
1926–2022
Geraldine Weiss, known as the “Grande Dame of Dividends,” was a trader, investor, and author who built a remarkable career for herself in the financial world during the latter half of the 20th century.
After earning her degree from University of California, Berkeley, Weiss developed a deep interest in investing in the early 1960s, doing night courses and famously reading every book she could find on the subject. Unfortunately, she was unable to find work as a broker, only being offered secretary positions. Undeterred, she carved her own path and in 1966 she launched the investment newsletter, Investment Quality Trends, becoming the first woman to found an investment advisory service.
For nearly four decades, Weiss published Investment Quality Trends, delivering impressive gains for her subscribers. For the first ten years, she wrote under the byline “G. Weiss,” allowing readers to assume she was a man. She revealed her identity in a 1977 interview on “Wall Street Week,” marking a defining moment in her career.
As the author of Dividends Don’t Lie and co-author of The Dividend Connection, Weiss popularized the theory of using dividend yield as a valuation metric. Her strategy focused on high-quality blue-chip companies with strong balance sheets capable of sustaining and growing dividends. By charting historical dividend yields, she identified buying opportunities when yields reached historically high levels and selling points when they fell to relative lows.
After 36 years at the helm of Investment Quality Trends, Weiss handed over editorial duties to Kelley Wright in 2002 and the newsletter still exists today. Weiss passed away in 2022, leaving a legacy of one of the most successful female investors of her time.
Henrietta “Hetty” Green – the “Witch of Wall Street”
1834 – 1916
Heady Green was an American businesswoman and financier known as “the richest woman in America” during the Gilded Age. Born into a wealthy Massachusetts family whose fortune stemmed from whaling fleets and maritime trade, she inherited a rigorous understanding of finance and took her family’s success to the next level.
By the time she was 13, Green had taken over accounting for the family business, a skill she learned from her grandfather. In an era when nearly all major financiers were men and women had no independent legal standing, she went on to oversee tremendous real estate deals, buy and sell railroads, and make loans.
Often described as an early practitioner of value and contrarian investing, Green built her fortune by purchasing distressed stocks, acquiring foreclosed properties, and extending large-scale loans during times of financial panic.
Green married a man named Edward Henry Green, but their marriage included the unusual step of a pre-nuptial agreement, which protected Green’s fortune. After her husband’s death, Green started wearing mourning clothes, and for years thereafter she was never seen on Wall Street except with a heavy swathing of black veil – a garment which, combined with her formidable reputation in finance, caused her to be known as the “Witch of Wall Street.”
Green was ruthless in her success, which attracted both controversy and criticism, but there is no doubt that she was a formidable businesswoman in an age of businessmen, and she was unforgiving in her right to have a seat at the table.
As the investing world continues to evolve, the legacies of these trailblazers serve as inspiration to keep pushing the boundaries in investing, challenging the status quo and supporting the next generation of aspiring leaders, who one day might make their own mark on history.
