Jezebel: zoe cruz

German Chancellor Angela Merkel Tops Forbes List Of Most Powerful Women

Jessica — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 09:30:00 EDT

Forbes just released its list of this year's 100 most powerful women, and it's a fearsome collection of heads of state, captains of industry, and entertainment giants. Coming in at #1 is Germany's first female Chancellor, Angela Merkel, she of the towering intellect (and towering cleavage). Another notable in the top ten is Indra K. Nooyi, the head of PepsiCo, who is the highest-paid female CEO in America and, as we previously mentioned, makes one-fourteenth of how much Larry Ellison, head of Oracle, pulled in last year. Forbes notes that fewer than 3% of of the country's biggest companies have female CEOs, and while women constitute 46% of the American labor force, they hold only 15% of the top corporate jobs.

But in this unfortunate economic climate, that 15% is still hurting, as Forbes points out that many top women in business, like beleaguered former Morgan Stanley exec Zoe Cruz, have lost their jobs this year. There are, of course, still many impressive business bitches holding it down, including #8 Ho Ching, the head of Singaporean sovereign wealth fund Temasek, #18 Mary Sammons, the CEO of Rite Aid, #19 Andrea Jung, the CEO of Avon, and #60 Judy McGrath, the CEO of MTV.

Angela Merkel is also in good company, with stateswomen like Argentinean President #13 Cristina Fernandez and deposed Myanmar Prime Minister/ Nobel peace laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, not to mention our girl Hillary Clinton at #28.

The list isn't all politicians and businesswomen: Meredith Vieira (#61) edges out Katie Couric (62), Barbara Walters (63), Diane Sawyer (65), and Christine Amanpour (#91) to be the most powerful woman in news, and architect Zaha Hadid comes in at #69. Whatever their professions, however, these women are much more impressive feminist icons than Candace Bushnell or Jenna Jameson.

100 Most Powerful Women [Forbes]

Earlier: German Titocracy
the Why Do We Know Lauren Conrad & Not Indra Nooyi?
Zoe Cruz Told Mortgage Traders To "Cut Losses," But They Thought She Was Just High On Crack

Zoe Cruz Told Mortgage Traders To "Cut Losses," But They Thought She Was Just High On Crack

Moe — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 12:00:00 EDT

Zoe Cruz is the subject of a long and kind of slow-boiling New York profile this week. Before she was sold out and thrown to the dogs by her old mentor at Morgan Stanley, Zoe Cruz was the most powerful woman on Wall Street. That is not saying much about her status in the ranks of powerful humans on Wall Street, of course, but it's good enough to sell a cover of New York in a year when the whole "Women In Power: Fuck This, There Really Is No Way To Win Is There?" meme is still relatively hot. Okay. So Zoe is powerful and widely disliked, which happens to men too but with nowhere near the persistence as w/r/t women, and... business office politics market conditions blah blah blah whoa now here is something that absolutely would not go down the same way had Zoe been a dude: While giving a year-end management speech to her fixed-income division, a "mid-level executive" interrupted the speech to say: ""Are you high? Because I really don't know what you're talking about."

"High?" Cruz asked. "You mean stoned?" "Yeah, exactly," he said. "Smoking it." Everyone in the room laughed—except Cruz.

She fired the asshole for "unrelated reasons" six months later, but it probably won't surprise you that this same division decided to make a risky bet into mortgage-backed securities — not the subprime ones, but the AAA ones that were supposed to be okay — in 2006, and Zoe kept an eye on the trade because it made her a little nervous, and asked them to calculate the potential loss in the occasion of a market meltdown, and when they came back with the number $3.5 billion she told them unequivocally to cut their losses, and they basically ignored her, and then the bank lost a shitload of money and she got blamed. They dispute that it happened exactly that way, but seriously, would you believe these fuckers? They were probably high.

According to a person briefed on her story, Cruz told both Daula and Shear, "I don't care what your view of probability is. Cut the position." The risk was too great, even for her. But whether Cruz actually gave that order is in dispute. Shear and Daula have denied she told them to cut the position. And by August, with the market in free fall, the Hubler bet had gone badly sour. Shear and Daula had managed to extract the company from $1.8 billion of the trade but had missed a crucial window of opportunity to untangle another $1.5 billion, a position that would metastasize into much more severe losses. In Cruz's view, the two men had ignored her orders and put the company in an untenable position. They "deferred to Howie [Hubler] instead of listening to Zoe," says one Cruz ally. Jay Dweck, a former Goldman Sachs executive who had recently joined Morgan, was heard by three people to say, "At Goldman, this isn't happening. When they say get out, they get out. At Morgan Stanley, when Zoe says get out, people start negotiating."

The story casts Zoe in the Greek and scrappy and ambitious and pretty and "fierce" and smart irrepressible-overachiever Tracy Flick mold you hear about Hillary Clinton. This might have been true, or she might have had a sparkling worldly incandescent intellect everyone is overlooking because of institutionalized systemic sexism. (To be sure, she once used the term "enheartening," which is not quite as bad as "embiggening" but is still not a word, in a public speech, so that was unfortunate.)

The Crash Of Morgan Stanley Executive Zoe Cruz [NY Mag]
Earlier: Women Are Underrepresented In Corporate America. Corporate America Is A Laughingstock. Coincidence?

Women Are Underrepresented In Corporate America. Corporate America Is A Laughingstock. Coincidence?

Moe — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 15:00:52 EDT

Why don't women have more power in corporate America? This month's Portfolio wrings its manicured hands over just that! The number of female board officers of Fortune 500 companies has been steadily falling over the past few years. As is the number of female lawyers! Zoe Cruz and Carly Fiorina, two of capitalism's highest profile females, have left leadership altogether! But it's such a sore subject, no one wants to talk about it. (Oh, also, when the Wall Street Journal did its annual section about "50 Women To Watch," all the ladies looked kinda butch. And then there was that Hillary Clinton Vogue debacle. Why do none of the women in power really want to appear very womanly?) And amidst all this there is this new book coming out called Warren Buffet Invests Like A Girl? It just doesn't make sense! Oh, but it does! Stop skirting the issue! Women don't run shit in corporate America because corporate America holds up high everything we hate about dudes. Obsessed with short-term thrills. Driven by them. Too often wholly lacking in any sort of long-term exit strategy. Competitive to the point of lunacy, arrogant to the point of self-immolation.

Daniel Gross, an apologist for blind Market worship, recently decried that the American management is such a fucking laughingstock. And why is that? He's not really sure. Maybe he should talk to Eliot Spitzer about it!

Women don't run corporate America because corporate America sucks.

I am not altogether serious about this. I mean, you know, theoretically — sometimes even in practice! — business is great. I love the systems and traditions that enable corporate innovation, and I love the speed with which industries, most notably the technology industries, can solve problems. (I know, that server outage just now might have seemed long, but that's just because y'all have been spoiled by Moore's Law.) But at a time when financial markets are melting down due to a disaster that could easily have been averted, when the Economist is starting to wonder whether Jeff Skilling might not be guilty of fraud because he just didn't bother trying to figure out what Andy Fastow was up to, it's hard not to be quietly satisfied that our gender is not to blame for this shit.

But now, you know, it's time for a new attack plan. Capitalism has been shaken at its foundations, layoffs are spinning out of control. On the plus side, managers are shell-shocked, insecure. Like a dude whose girlfriend just left him for another woman. Or something. So next performance review, do yourself a favor. Demand a promotion. You're entitled to it.

Well, not really, if you're reading this. But would that stop you if you were a dude? Rhetorical question.

Sexist Or Not? [Portfolio]
Is Jeff Skilling Innocent [Economist]
Sexism In The Workplace [Portfolio]