Regrets from other side of glass ceiling
|Published
Erin Callan, left, is a former tax lawyer once dubbed 'the most powerful woman on Wall Street'. Erin Callan, left, is a former tax lawyer once dubbed 'the most powerful woman on Wall Street'.
Dublin - At a Lehman Brother’s office party in 2005, a colleague of Erin Callan approached her then husband and jokingly asked what his workaholic wife did on the weekends.
“Does she kayak, go rock climbing and then run a half marathon?” the woman asked. “No,” Callan’s husband simply replied, “she sleeps.”
For decades as one of the few female titans on Wall Street, Erin Callan was a one-woman financial working machine. As the chief financial officer for Lehman Brothers, Callan carried the weight of the doomed investment bank on her impressively young shoulders.
She checked her Blackberry obsessively all day. She ate lunch at her desk. One birthday she opted not to celebrate and instead took an overnight flight to Europe for a meeting. Weekends were spent frantically emailing and arranging her jam-packed schedule for the week ahead. Weekdays were spent locked inside her Manhattan office, scrambling to keep the behemoth bank afloat from imminent bankruptcy.
Now, five years after leaving the disgraced bank in a cloud of public humiliation, the 47-year-old Irish-American wonders what it was all about.
“Work always came first, before my family, friends and marriage – which ended just a few years later,” she wrote recently in a poignant op-ed in The New York Times.
“I don’t have children, so it might seem that my story lacks relevance to the work-life balance debate. Like everyone, though, I did have relationships – a spouse, friends and family – and none of them got the best version of me. They got what was left over,” she said.
Callan’s controversial comments are in no way accidental. Her op-ed comes in the midst of a renewed debate in America about whether working women can “have it all” – a discussion reignited recently by Facebook executive Sheryl Sandberg, who has written a provocative book, Lean In, urging women to push harder to get ahead in the work place.
Just like the Mommy Wars of old, Sandberg and Callan – and a host of other top female executives and academics – are now pitted in a feisty feminist cat fight about the best way to maintain a work-life balance.
Sandberg, 43, a multi-millionaire hi-tech wunderkind, argues that women are failing to get ahead because they lack self-confidence and are “pulling back when they should be leaning in”.
“From the moment they are born, boys and girls are treated differently. Women internalise the negative messages we get throughout our lives – the messages that say it’s wrong to be outspoken, aggressive, more powerful than men,” Sandberg writes in Lean In.
Just down the road from Sandberg’s offices in Silicon Valley, Marissa Mayer, 37, chief executive of Yahoo!, caused outrage in the media recently when she issued an order calling all Yahoo! telecommuters back to the mother ship – irrespective of whether they had children at home or not.
Mayer’s work-from-home ban took on special resonance given her own personal circumstances. Last year, following the birth of her first child, Mayer famously took off just two weeks of maternity leave. Mayer’s son, Macallister, now spends his days at a nursery built next door to her office.
Regretful at having sacrificed everything for banking, Erin Callan is now openly critical of Sandberg and Mayer’s rigid positions. She writes in The New York Times of her struggles to conceive, at age 47, through successive attempts at in vitro fertilisation.
“I have spent several years now living a different version of my life, where I try to apply my energy to my new husband, Anthony, and the people whom I love and care about,” she wrote. “But I can’t make up for lost time. Most important, although I now have stepchildren, I missed having a child of my own.”
The daughter of a New York City police officer and a stay-at-home mother, Callan grew up in the gritty Irish-American suburbs of Queens, New York.
She attended Harvard and New York University law school before pursuing a career as a tax lawyer.
In 1995, Callan joined Lehman Brothers where she would make her name and fortune, running a hedge-fund unit that caught the attention of the Lehman big suits. In a city where bankers are remembered for their last big deal, Callan struck pure gold – engineering General Mills takeover of Pillsbury in 2000 for $10.5-billion.
Fashionable, frank and a galvanising force on Wall Street, Callan – at the height of her game – was unstoppable. At just 41, she was anointed chief financial officer of Lehman’s, becoming Wall Street’s most powerful woman. Whenever she spoke, people listened. Her frequent interviews on television could send stock prices soaring or tumbling.
Callan’s insistence that Lehman’s finances were healthy in the run-up to the bank’s catastrophic collapse led to her shock resignation just six months after assuming the job as chief financial officer – and her demonisation on Wall Street and in the public square.
Having once been feted in the homes of New York’s elite, she became the Greta Garbo of the financial world – practically disappearing from public view, refusing all interviews, cutting off contact with her former colleagues, spotted only occasionally at her favourite spin class in Manhattan.
As the collapse of Lehman played out on the front pages of the world’s media, Callan’s marriage collapsed and her world shrank to the confines of her East Hampton home.
In November 2011, Callan re-emerged into the spotlight to marry her long-time boyfriend, fireman Anthony Montella, in an intimate ceremony in midtown Manhattan.
Wearing a silver gown and strappy Jimmy Choo shoes she was photographed dancing late into the night with her new husband. Recently the couple sold her $4-million home in the Hamptons and bought a two-bedroom, two-bath house in Florida overlooking the water for just over $829 000.
It is in this home that Callan hopes to re-establish the work-life balance that she jettisoned so easily during her high-flying rise to the top of Wall Street; a sacrifice that she now says was, “not worth it”.
“Until recently, I thought my singular focus on my career was the most powerful ingredient in my success,” Callan said. “But I am beginning to realise that I sold myself short.” – Irish Independent