12/02/2025
1967. The New York Stock Exchange.
1,365 men in dark suits. Zero women. Not one. Not ever. In 175 years.
Muriel Siebert was about to change that.
But first, they were going to make her suffer for it.
She'd arrived in New York thirteen years earlier with nothing. A used Studebaker. Five hundred dollars in her pocket. A dream she couldn't shake.
And a lie.
When she applied for her first job on Wall Street, she claimed she had a college degree. She didn't. She'd dropped out when her father was diagnosed with cancer—the family couldn't afford tuition anymore.
But she had something no degree could teach: the ability to look at a page of numbers and see the future.
The men at the brokerage houses looked at her resume and saw one problem: Muriel.
A woman's name.
So she changed it to M.F. Siebert.
Suddenly, the phone started ringing.
She got hired at Bache & Company for $65 a week. She was assigned to cover the aviation industry—a sector most analysts dismissed. Railroads were king. Who cared about airplanes?
Muriel did.
She saw what others missed. Commercial aviation was coming. Jets were about to change everything.
She told her clients to buy Boeing.
She was right.
By 1965, she was earning $250,000 a year. By some accounts, $500,000 by 1967. She was one of the most successful analysts on Wall Street.
But her male colleagues doing the exact same job? They earned 50 to 100 percent more.
Same work. Same results. Half the pay.
A friend named Gerald Tsai saw her frustration. He gave her advice that would change history: Buy a seat on the New York Stock Exchange. Work for yourself.
She laughed. "Don't be ridiculous."
Then she thought about it.
She wasn't laughing anymore.
To buy a seat, she needed a sponsor. Someone already on the exchange to vouch for her application.
The first man said no.
The second said no.
The third. The fourth. The fifth. The sixth. The seventh. The eighth. The ninth.
All no.
The tenth man finally said yes.
But the NYSE wasn't finished.
They created a new rule. A rule that had never existed before in 175 years. A rule designed specifically for her.
They demanded she get a letter from a bank promising to loan her $300,000 of the $445,000 seat price.
No male applicant had ever faced this requirement.
But the banks wouldn't commit. Not until the NYSE admitted her first.
And the NYSE wouldn't admit her without the bank letter.
A perfect trap. A catch-22. Built just to stop Muriel Siebert.
For two years, she fought.
Door after door slammed in her face. Bank after bank refused.
Then Chase Manhattan broke ranks. They gave her the loan.
On December 28, 1967, Muriel "Mickie" Siebert walked onto the floor of the New York Stock Exchange.
The headlines mocked her. "Skirt Invades Exchange." "Powder Puff on Wall Street."
They didn't even give her the standard scroll that every new member received.
But she was there. The first woman in 175 years.
1,365 men and her.
She would remain the only woman for the next decade.
Ten years. Alone.
The indignities never stopped.
At the Union League Club, she arrived for a board luncheon meeting. They wouldn't let her use the elevator. She had to walk through the kitchen and climb the back stairs like hired help.
Her male colleagues noticed her fury during the meeting. Afterward, they tried to take her down in the elevator. When the club refused again—even with them vouching for her—every single one of them walked down the stairs and through the kitchen with her.
That incident drove her to testify before government bodies about the discriminatory policies of New York's private clubs. Eventually, those clubs changed their rules.
But the New York Stock Exchange? They held out longer.
Twenty years. It took twenty years to get a women's bathroom on the seventh floor, near the luncheon club where all the real deals were made.
"Not since I was a baby," she recalled wryly, "had so many people been so interested in my bathroom habits."
She finally got that bathroom in 1987. How?
She told the chairman that if there wasn't a ladies' room by the end of the year, she would have a portable toilet delivered to the trading floor.
They built the bathroom.
In 1977, the Governor of New York made her Superintendent of Banking. First woman ever to hold the position.
She oversaw $500 billion in banking assets during one of the most turbulent financial periods in American history. Banks were failing across the country.
The result?
Not a single New York bank failed during her five-year tenure.
And that bank that refused to write her loan letter back in 1965?
She had the perfect revenge.
"I regulated the bank that wouldn't write the letter to guarantee my NYSE seat loan."
She never married. Never had children. Her constant companion was a longhaired Chihuahua named Monster Girl—a tiny creature, she liked to say, that couldn't be cowed by the big dogs.
Just like her owner.
When people asked her about money, she had a simple answer: "Money represents power to men. But to me it represents freedom."
Freedom to walk through the front door. Freedom to ride the elevator. Freedom to use the bathroom.
Freedom she had to fight for every single day.
When she died in 2013 at 84, they finally gave her what they'd always withheld.
The New York Stock Exchange named a room in her honor. Siebert Hall. The first time in history they'd named any room after any individual.
The girl who arrived with $500 and a used Studebaker.
The woman who erased her own name just to get a phone call.
The pioneer who spent twenty years fighting for a bathroom.
Someone once asked Muriel Siebert how she'd accomplished everything she did.
"When I see a challenge," she said, "I put my head down and charge."
She never stopped charging.
