The first woman to buy a seat on the New York Stock Exchange and head one of its member firms has died.
Muriel "Mickie" Siebert died Saturday in New York at age 80, The New York Times reports. The cause was complications of cancer.
Here's more from The Times:
"Ms. Siebert, known to all as Mickie, cultivated the same brash attitude that characterized Wall Street's most successful men. She bought her seat on the exchange in 1967, but to her immense anger, she remained the only woman admitted to membership for almost a decade.
She was one of the pioneers in the discount brokerage field, as she transformed Muriel Siebert & Company (now a subsidiary of Siebert Financial) into a discount brokerage in 1975, on the first day that Big Board members were allowed to negotiate commissions.
She also was the first woman to be superintendent of banking for New York State, appointed by Gov. Hugh Carey in 1977. She served five years during a rocky time when banks were tottering and interest rates were skyrocketing."
In a 2003 interview with NPR, Siebert spoke of the challenges she faced when she first began working on Wall Street: "I had changed jobs two or three times because when I was making $13,000 a year, they [men] were making $20[000]," she said. "You know, that's a quality of life decision at that kind of money."
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