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In Chapter 14 of 14, Suits: A Woman on Wall Street, author Nina Godiwalla shares why female role models are so critical in building a corporate finance career.

Transcript

Why Morgan Stanley Banker Seeks Female Role Models - Nina Godiwalla Erik Michielsen: How a female role models and mentors giving you strength and support on your journey to date? Nina Godiwalla: Because I've lived in different cities, I've been in different countries, there are moments in my life where I am very, very aware I'm a woman. And one of the most striking examples is when I was in investment banking. And I didn’t have this awareness of being – usually it's like there's different things that standout, depending on what environment you're in and for me, I was in a group, I was the only woman in my group for awhile, when I was in investment banking. And it's a completely different culture, that I wasn’t very familiar with. That was one of the times in life I realized I really need. I need somebody that’s done this. I need a woman around me to help kind of navigate the system. And I would say before that in life, I hadn't necessarily, I was not seeking out women mentors, when I was in college, getting a finance degree at UTE, there wasn’t an attitude of here, let me find other women. But being thrown in that environment that was so different, suddenly I really quite desperately sought. I really sought other women and what was interesting to me about the investment banking world is there were definitely – the women that had been there, there were so few that had been there for a very, very long time. But, I found that there was very different perspectives with women. Some people were, “Yeah, let me help you, how can we do this? How can we work? How can I be your mentor? And then there were other people of you’ve just got to rough it out. This is what it is and we don’t need to talk about the things that are happening and if this is not working for you, just keep pushing through, put your head down, keep pushing through. And I obviously, I gravitated towards people that – it's actually something I wanted to discuss and talk about different things. And I couldn’t have made it through in a lot of ways without those mentors. The experience I had was in incorporate finance which was kind of an experience where it's keeping you working all the time. You don’t necessarily have that time to reflect and think about things. I started to Morgan Stanley’s Women’s Committee because I found people were looking for some guidance and they just had no idea where to go, because they would look to the people right about a year ahead of them and there was an analyst program, and those people were so busy, and the senior women, they were so senior, and there was a few of them that you just wouldn’t go call them up and say, “Hey, I had a bad day today, can I talk to you?” So, it was really kind of bringing a group of women together is what I started because I found that was the way people are going to help get rough. Because a lot of people when they start coming to me with their issues and this was happening and this kind of stuff was happening. And so I thought why don’t we bring this group together?