Skip to Content

Stanford Business magazine

 

Quant Jock Proves Naysayers Wrong

ClaymanMichelle Clayman, MBA ’79, founded a New York asset management firm that now invests $6 billion. Not bad for a girl whose grandmother said her education would “make her eyeballs spin around in her head,” Clayman recalls. Later, after she graduated from Oxford University, Clayman’s father marveled that she, a girl, had found a job. When she quit that job to attend the Business School, he warned against it, cautioning that she might never get another position.

Today such antiquated attitudes are almost funny. But not quite. Clayman concedes they have left their mark on her. For example, when she received an email inviting her to headline the Women in Management (WIM) banquet in May, she demurred, replying, “Oh my gosh. Am I interesting enough?”

Well, yes, she is. Clayman is a pioneer in the male-dominated field of quantitative analysis in finance and founded New Amsterdam Partners, the money management firm where today she is managing partner and CEO.

But she still succumbs to moments of “girly” modesty, she told the WIM conference, after finally saying yes to their invitation. She reported she gave in to similar feelings in 2006, when she donated $3 million to Stanford’s Institute for Research on Women and Gender—now the Michelle R. Clayman Institute for Gender Research. When she found out the institution’s leaders wanted to put her name on it, she told them, oh, no, you can have the money but please “don’t name it for li’l ol’ me.”

Clayman suspects she owes her first finance job at Bank of America to a group of female employees that had sued the company, and she asked her mostly female audience to remember the women who came before them. “You have to look back through history,” she said. “There are plenty of people who did something for you.”