Citi’s next CEO Jane Fraser on K-shaped recovery, breaking gender barriers and ex-CEO Vikram Pandit’s game-changing advice
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Playing the game differently meant leaning into her love of office pranks. It also meant working part-time when she was a partner at management consultancy McKinsey with two young sons while her husband Bert Piedra, former head of global banking at Dresdner Kleinwort, was in a “much more senior role”, and speaking publicly about feeling “exhausted” and “guilty” from her efforts to manage both a career and a family.
And, thanks to a revelatory stint working in Spain as a junior banker for Goldman Sachs, it meant casting off black suits and “drab grey coats” for something closer to the “dramatic and colourful clothes” local women wore. “They were themselves . . . and they were powerful and they were feminine,” says Fraser, who today is wearing a bright red dress, though it is mostly hidden on Zoom.
She was taken aback by how much attention there was when her promotion was unveiled, triggering a flurry of publicity about the shattering of Wall Street’s ultimate glass ceiling. “I hadn’t been thinking of it in those terms,” she says, though she reconciled herself to the spotlight when she realized it could inspire others.
She had some help from corporate America’s sisterhood in the form of Mary Barra, chief executive of General Motors, who told Fraser that she should “embrace” the focus on her gender because it aided progress, and then spend the rest of her time focused on her job. “Because at the end of the day,” Fraser says, “the most important thing is, can I do a good job in the day job?”
