In this episode of Boss Files, from Wall Street power broker to entrepreneur, I want you to meet Sally Krawcheck. She is one of the highest ranking women on Wall Street ever. She was previously the CEO of Smith Barney, the CEO of Merrill Lynch Wealth Management, and the chief financial officer of Citigroup. Now she is the founder of Elvest, a digital investment platform

focused solely on women. She is also out with a brand new book, Own It, The Power of Women

at Work. The title is Own It. What's behind those words?

Well, I think many layers are behind the words. You know, what I'm hearing from women,

particularly in the post-election world, is, hey, what we were

doing before to advance women in business, it actually stalled out some time ago.

So what can we do differently today?

Not wait for the guys to get it, right?

Not wait to be empowered, which means to be given power. A word you hate. A word I hate. But what can we own? What can we do to move it forward? And so there's also a sense of one of the things we can do to move things forward is professional women can start businesses to a greater degree than we ever could. So we can also literally own it. You call this the fourth wave of feminism. What is that wave?

I say that money can be the fourth wave of feminism. So on the one hand, we control a tremendous

amount of assets, $5 trillion of investable assets, 80% of consumer spending or half the workforce.

On an individual basis, however, we don't have as much money as the guys do.

We retire with two-thirds their money, even though we live longer.

And I would put forth that until we are financially equal with men, we are not equal with men.

And so part of my work has been identifying the gender money gaps.

We've all heard about the gender pay gap. But there's a gender investing gap that costs your viewers and listeners hundreds of thousands, some millions of dollars over the course of their lives. Let's back into your career a little bit. We need to give people a sense of the history of where you came from and how you rose up. You rose to be the most powerful woman

on Wall Street, no question. You were CFO of Citigroup during the middle of it all of the

crisis. No, before. Before, but then, but in the lead up to what created the crisis, right? So you

were the CFO of Citigroup and you got fired. Yes. And today you say you got fired because you were a woman. That is a provocative statement. Provocative and shocking. And if you'd asked me at the time, I would have said, Poppy, this was a boardroom brawl. I mean, it had nothing to do with the fact I was a woman. So to back up, I was running Smith Barney at Citigroup during the crisis.

We had sold products to clients that were supposed to be low risk, that ended up being high risk, that were supposed to go down a little bit, and ended up going down everything.

I went to my new boss and said, we got a problem. Let's partially reimburse our clients. He said, no, it went back and forth and back and forth. It went to the board. We did it. And I was later fired, not very much later. I was the only one to the best of my knowledge on Wall Street to do it. And as time has passed, I've said, you know what? Was it a coincidence that I was the only senior woman of the company, one of the only senior women in the whole industry, and I was the only one to return client money?

Was there something about my difference, my femaleness that led to that?

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