Sallie Krawcheck

Current Company

Ellevest — CEO & Co-Founder

The Most Powerful Woman on Wall Street

Sallie Krawcheck's rise through the ranks of Wall Street finance reads like a case study in breaking glass ceilings — and in what happens when you break them too visibly. After starting as a research analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein, she became the firm's CEO and built it into Wall Street's most respected independent research shop. From there, she moved to Citigroup as CFO and then head of its Global Wealth Management division, and later ran Merrill Lynch Wealth Management at Bank of America. At each position, she was the most senior woman in the organization and one of the most senior women in the history of American finance.

Her departure from Bank of America in 2011 was instructive. Krawcheck had pushed back against the bank's strategy of cross-selling products to wealth management clients — a practice she believed prioritized short-term revenue over client interests and would eventually backfire. She was right: the practices she objected to contributed to billions in regulatory fines and client lawsuits. But being right didn't protect her position. The experience crystallized her thinking about the structural barriers women face in finance — not just overt discrimination, but systems designed around male career patterns, male risk tolerance, and male financial assumptions.

Rebuilding Finance for the Other Half of the Population

Krawcheck launched Ellevest in 2016 with a thesis that the investment industry was systematically underserving women — not through malice but through design. Traditional robo-advisors and retirement calculators assume linear career trajectories, identical risk tolerance across genders, and life expectancies based on male averages. Women, who on average live longer, earn less, take career breaks for caregiving, and are more likely to outlive their retirement savings, need investment strategies that account for these realities. Ellevest's algorithms incorporate gender-specific salary curves, longer life expectancy projections, and career-break assumptions to produce investment plans tailored to women's actual financial lives.

Beyond the product, Krawcheck has used Ellevest as a platform to reframe the conversation about women and money. She argues that the gender investing gap — women invest at lower rates and in more conservative vehicles than men — is not a confidence problem but a design problem: the industry was built to make men comfortable, and it shouldn't surprise anyone that women feel unwelcome. Her newsletter, podcast, and public speaking have made her the most prominent voice arguing that closing the gender wealth gap isn't just a feminist issue but an economic one — that the trillions of dollars women are leaving on the table by not investing represent a market opportunity that the financial industry is too blinkered to see.