Muriel Siebert: The First Woman to Own a Seat on the NYSE

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In late 1967 the New York Stock Exchange had 1,365 members, and exactly one of them was a woman. Muriel Siebert, known as Mickey, was born in Cleveland, Ohio in September 1928 and left Western Reserve University without a degree to care for her ill father. She moved to New York, learned the market from the ground up as an analyst of aviation and aerospace stocks, and founded Muriel Siebert and Company. Then she went after a seat that cost a near record $445,000, and nine men in a row refused to sponsor her.

This episode follows how she broke a perfect bureaucratic loop, then kept changing shape: defender of research-driven brokerage against discount rivals, New York's superintendent of banks during the turmoil of the late 1970s, Senate primary candidate, and head of a public company created through an unusual reverse merger. In her later years she argued for women and minorities in finance in the language Wall Street respects, competitive risk, and tied her firm's underwriting profits to charity.

• The exchange demanded a bank letter guaranteeing a $300,000 loan, a condition never asked of a man, while the banks refused to lend until the exchange admitted her. She was elected to membership on December 28, 1967.
• When the SEC made commissions negotiable in 1975, the change known as May Day, Siebert ran ads attacking discount rates as low ball to protect the research her firm was built on.
• Appointed by Governor Hugh Carey in 1977, she oversaw banks holding about $500 billion in assets, and not one New York bank failed during her tenure.
• After finishing second to Florence M. Sullivan in the 1982 Republican Senate primary, she took her firm public by merging into J. Michael and Sons, a liquidating furniture company.
• Her Siebert Entrepreneurial Philanthropic Plan, created in 1990, shared half of new underwriting profits with charities and gave over $5 million through 2006. In 2016 the exchange named Siebert Hall in her honor, the first room it ever named for an individual.