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    "Suits": An unflinching look at what it's like to be a woman on Wall Street

    By | Work + Money – Tue, Apr 5, 2011 9:56 PM EDT

    When it comes to being successful in your career, who you know is often as important as what you know. And nowhere is that more evident than on Wall Street-especially if you're a woman.

    "So much of succeeding in the business world is relationships," says Nina Godiwalla, a former analyst with Morgan Stanley and the author of "Suits: A Woman on Wall Street." Written in the hopes of giving young women a better idea of what they'll face in a high-pressure finance career, Godiwalla's book is a compelling, unflinching, first-person account of what it was like to be a junior analyst during the the dot-com boom of the late 1990s. "I just didn't think things were different for women until I experienced what I did," she told me.

    If you have common experiences, it's easier to get along. But for the daughter of immigrants from India, part of the small but tightly knit Zoroastrian community, who grew up attending public schools in Texas, that common ground was hard to come by in the high-pressure world of finance.

    "In New York, I was considered a Texan. In Texas, I was an Indian. In India, I was a Persian," she explains in the book. "All the labeling felt isolating. Not everyone needs to fit in, but I wanted to."

    In the first chapter (which you can read here), she describes the first day of her first summer internship at JP Morgan: "To my right were three Yale students talking about their operations professor and to my left were two Dartmouth students reminiscing about their annual Polar Bear Swim. I rummaged through the Kmart briefcase my parents had bought me as an "our daughter is going to Wall Street!" gift. I was about to take out my binder before I realized that some might find the plastic burnt orange folder out of place on the table neatly lined with Italian leather notebooks."

    But while it's possible to fake a privileged background among country-club veterans with Ivy Leauge pedigrees, it's impossible to ignore the fact that she's female. "You're seeing things that are very subtle," she says. "When all these subtle small things are happening, at the time, it's hard to identify it as sexual harassment."

    The group she worked with at Morgan Stanley-corporate finance-wasn't used to having women around, she says bluntly. She was the only female on a team of 25 men; misogynistic emails, stripper stories, condescending conversations, and being excluded from projects and events were all par for the course-and that's after she took pains to level the playing field.

    Photo courtesy of Nina GodiwallaPhoto courtesy of Nina Godiwalla"I wore things to work that looked particularly conservative," she writes in "Suits." "Better plain than attractive. My hair was always tied back tight in a low ponytail so as not to give anyone the impression that I was flirting. I learned from how they talked about my female counterparts that you would quickly get permanently compartmentalized. You were either brutish because you were there to succeed or flirty because you were looking to hook up. Once you got into the flirty category it seemed impossible to dig yourself out."

    She changed her look and her lifestyle, avoiding personal relationships and eliminating anything that wasn't "corporate" enough. "My long, permed hair and made-up face on my Texas driver's license looked nothing like the mascara-free face my coworkers saw daily," she writes.

    Eventually, the 80-hour work weeks, alcohol-fueled nights, and the drive for perfection, money, and power cost many of her colleagues their health and sanity. It also made Godiwalla reconsider what she was doing in New York. "It's not just a job," she writes. "It dictates our life-when we can eat, sleep, and shower. Even who we have time to be friends with."

    "I was on the trading floor before where they screamed and threw phones. I could handle that," she told a coworker, on the verge of a nervous breakdown. "But in corporate finance, I feel like it's slow brainwashing. I'm being rewarded for being a monkey-for agreeing not to think, speak, or have an opinion."

    "This is changing me," she writes. "This isn't about them. I hate who I'm becoming."

    Godiwalla is now the chief executive of MindWorks, a consulting firm that teaches companies about stress management. She's back in Texas, where she lives with her husband and their new baby-and she's much happier about what she's doing now.

    As a first-generation American, she, like many children of immigrants, felt driven to succeed in order to justify what her parents sacrificed to give her a better life in America. But her experience on Wall Street has changed her definition of success, she says.

    "Certainly there's a threshold of wealth that you need, a certain threshold of power," she admits. "But happiness plays a much bigger part in what I want for my child."




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