Sallie Krawcheck: Wall Street boss who was glad to be sacked

Sallie Krawcheck wants to see more women in top financial jobs

 Sallie Krawcheck used to be the most powerful woman on Wall Street - before two very public sackings at the height of the financial collapse.

Now the head of women's networking organisation 85 Broads, she says she's grateful she was fired.
From 2007-2011, Ms Krawcheck held prominent roles at banks Citigroup and Merrill Lynch.
Those positions made her, arguably, the highest ranking woman on Wall Street.
But, at the height of the financial crisis of 2008-2009, she had very public clashes with Vikram Pandit, the then chief executive of Citigroup, over her insistence that the bank should repay investors who had lost money using defective financial instruments that Citi had created.

85 Broads is a networking organisation for professional women

Eventually, she was forced out - a fate that would once again befall her, just a few years later, after taking on the role of chief executive at Merrill Lynch, a subsidiary of Bank of America.

Although those firings certainly stung, they gave Ms Krawcheck an epiphany - she felt that in times of distress, companies react by closing ranks, and diversity, particularly gender diversity, suffers.
"What I saw a thousand times during the downturn was, 'We'd like to give her that opportunity, but we need to go with the sure thing - we can't afford diversity right now,'" she says.
So now, as the boss of 85 Broads, Ms Krawcheck says her goal is to work in a more active way to correct the gender imbalance at the top.

'Invest in women' Ms Krawcheck bought 85 Broads for an undisclosed fee from its founder, Janet Hanson, in May.
Created by a group of women who worked at Goldman Sachs' former headquarters at 85 Broad Street, it was initially created to mentor women in the bank. Now, it's exploded to a membership organisation with more than 30,000 paid subscribers from 130 countries.